Just finished this hack today. As a babby who has only currently played the GBA games, it was nice to play something that didn’t really depart from the “vanilla” games mechanically but still offered another story to tell. Thank you for going to the trouble of translating it!
I was a little disappointed by the lack of support conversations, but I assume that this is because they weren’t present in the original hack either.
The translation itself is… pretty decent, for something that is primarily machine-translated. The story and underlying characterisations seem to be intact and coherent, and I didn’t feel at any point that it was getting in the way of me enjoying the game.
Most of the mistakes are the sort of thing that would be more in a proofreader’s realm of expertise rather than a translator (i.e. rearranging some sentences, some changes to how formally certain characters speak…), but there are a couple of things that stuck out to me:
translation boo-boos (minor spoilers)
- “The Bern’s army”. I must have seen this singular phrase like 50 times, to the point where I wished I’d kept an actual count. You also see things like “the Lorca’s tribe”, “the Ilia’s knights”, and so on. Probably just caused by the machine translator parsing の phrases incorrectly.
- “You guys”, “Those guys”, et cetera. I get that there’s only so many ways that a bot can translate anatatachi, omaetachi and all that, but it… doesn’t really fit with the setting, I guess? It felt weird hearing it from people like Saya, Lyn and Loki.
- There were only two instances where whole sentences were put through the wringer, and in both cases I presume it was because of a Japanese idiom being lost in translation. These were probably the most notable mistakes (which, if anything, should indicate that the overall translation is fairly solid).
Tsas: “I agree with you. Both of us will eventually lead our respective tribes. We’ve got to make sure we don’t get our parents nascent glow and back fingers pointed at us.”
This is from the “3 months ago” cutscene at the beginning of chapter 2. I spent the next hour or so trying to figure out what the hell this was supposed to be originally, but to no avail. Was good for a laugh, though.
Lyn: “If it were possible, I would have wanted the sword to remain a symbol of the heart for you… But I guess that’s not the case anymore.”
This is from the cutscene at the end of chapter 19, where Saya receives the Joro Katti.
In addition, there were also a couple instances of residual JP text that I noticed (besides the ones that DelphiSage mentioned above).
If you enter the Status screen during the second part of Chapter 26 (where you fight Zenon), the game displays the JP name of Chapter 28E from FE7 (Valorous Roland).
All of Arel’s comments in the Evaluation menu are in Japanese.
This is kind of minor, but the name of the menu where you view your results is also in Japanese. I could honestly overlook this, since the menu doesn’t really work properly anyway (and to be honest I don’t even know if the author went to the trouble of making rank parameters of their own, or if they just kept FE7’s ones).
My endgame units, for the curious (definitely spoilers, also I swear a lot)
A pretty quintessential mediocre swordlord, but better than her mother for the simple fact that the Mani Katti has 3x effectiveness now, turning it from a good weapon to an excellent weapon, a prime Hammerne candidate. There’s no shortage of enemies to use it on, especially after she promotes (and speaking of, she doesn’t mind having a Killer Bow to play with either).
She made up one half of my final boss kill, getting two 19% crits in a row with the Sol Katti for 72 damage.
The resident Marcus of this hack. Useful for the entire game, whether for his starting bulk or his ridiculous speed growth later on. The by-design strength and HP falloff is sensible, but not nearly enough to warrant benching him.
Had some mediocre levels early on and was in danger of getting benched, but his strength caught up and gave him a reason to stick around (even if his speed didn’t). He, Tsagan and Saya formed a support triangle.
Absolute madlad. This fucker was +5 in defense for the latter two-thirds of the game, essentially making him an armor knight with cav move. Give him effective weaponry like heavy spears, and watch him do just enough damage to get crucial onerounds on cavs and armors.
The game tried so hard to make Grape shit in my run. It really did. He had what I’d describe as “constipated levels”; 4 or 5 levels where he gets one stat, and then a level where he gets all but one.
Thankfully, he did not get screwed in speed, which meant he could always do good damage with magic swords on units with low res. Having full supports from Rostov and Lydia helped, too.
First flier privileges. Hit 20 speed at level 9. Not an all-consuming slayer of men like lynmode!Florina, but still very helpful chip and rescues. Her main utility, though, was as a support partner for…
The MVP.
So, I kinda have a thing for
Mercenaries. As soon as I saw Emmy in Chapter 3, I was determined to favour the absolute shit out of her, and thankfully I was repaid many times over. I don’t recall giving her common-or-garden statboosters, but she got the Boots, the Drops and the Body Ring.It made me kind of sad to see lots of people whose Emmy got screwed stat-wise. I fed a lot of bosses to her and by mid-game she was an unfuckwittable monster that, if I were at all interested in playing efficiently, could probably have solo’ed the game. I even managed to kill Zephiel and Chapter 20 Gilling with her, which were easily the hypest parts of the run for me.
Surprisingly didn’t have a hand in the final boss, though only because I got lucky with a couple other units.
Emmy’s other support partner. Started falling off in speed mid-game but got by on Killer weapons, effective-damage weapons and supporting Emmy. By the end of the game, the latter was mostly his only purpose. He could probably do really well with more levels, though; he’s certainly got the growths for it.
The next best candidate for MVP.
This guy was so fucking fun to use. Surprisingly your best anti-mage for quite a while; Flux’s attack power brute-forces through their Res, they barely plink Rabi in return, and if he gets speed early he’ll start doubling and one-rounding them. He was the only real attacking mage I trained for the whole game, and he was the only one I needed. Supported by Feeler and Trachina.
Rabi was the other half of the final boss kill; he hit a 60% Eclipse.
le s-tier dancer
A unit that I benched early, and regretted doing so later. I was intimidated by her shaky combat early on, and didn’t consider the benefit of a Rabi/Feeler triangle. Instead I ended up awkwardly carting both her and Eliza around; I reinstated her early enough to build her support with Rabi, but not early enough to do much else apart from heal people.
Grape’s other support partner, and another symptom of my
Mercenary/Hero affinity. Good at her join time, but fell off late-game in much the same manner as Dorcas.
The unit I was deploying instead of Trachina. She has the 70% magic, but she’s no Nino. I’d’ve been better off training Trachina for the Dark magic damage potential, or even keeping Fromy/using Karen for the better staff rank (Restore is helpful later). That being said, the extra Heal hand still paid dividends.
Hilariously tanky at his join time, obviously starts to take more and more damage thanks to his growths. It’s tempting to pour a bunch of statboosters into him (and I did give him a Robe, I think), but personally he can get by without them as long as you don’t overextend. You could give him the Talisman to make him more versatile, but then again Barrier exists.
I also noticed that there doesn’t seem to be an existing guide to this romhack (well, an English one, anyway). So I wrote the damn thing myself. Here you go.
Unit bases/growths/starting inventories, a support list at the end, pictures of every map, lists of collectibles/stealables and most reinforcements, among other things.
Yes, you could find out all this stuff by cracking open FEBuilder, but trying to interpret reinforcement eventing as a first-time user is like trying to read Joyce through the bottom of a coke bottle.