Fire Emblem: The Sword of Seals (Arabic patch)

I fell in love with the series and took an interest in helping with an ongoing Arabic scanlation of the manga Fire Emblem Hasha no Tsurugi and eventually decided to do the game.

The big problem was that game modifications are an order of magnitude more difficult than airbrushing static manga scans, and Arabic script has enough quirks it doesn’t lend itself too well to game mods. Most translation patches are for games built for Unreal Engine 4, after an 2016 patch that added full Arabic support, and it’s harder to find people willing to add that support from scratch for older games that require that. It’s easier to dismiss as impossible.

You can download FE6 - Sword of Seals - Arabic patch from here:

https://mega.nz/#!Ub40GKjY!-lhoAkR0CvNL-miDGU_437EwAR66qdsrj78ACSx1Nkc

Apply to a Japanese FE6 ROM using a UPS patcher.

As many in the know may be aware of, Fire Emblem games on GBA have a compressed script (except for the unique case of the unreleased official Chinese port of FE6) that uses a Huffman variant. Moreover, as Fire Emblem 6 never got an official English port, it uses Shift-JIS primarily with the fan patch only partially covering it with an ASCII support hack. Besides both edits of the English translation patch (we settled for the second), the massive help that was FEditor Advance (by Hextator and Zahlman) and FEBuilderGBA (by 7743)‎ can’t be understated, for it was the reason why the project could continue at all.

This game was a massive labor of love. Most translated text was inserted in the game by 2017, but the trials and tribulations of real life sidetracked us a bit, and we were overwhelmed with the massive, soul-crushing, cursed, abominably-written support conversations that were as big as the main story. With just two translators, I don’t think a repeat of that will happen and we might just skip them in future projects unless we get more manpower somehow. We did finish those for the record (they took 9 months of the project alone). The last hurdle was menu text needed to play the game (you don’t say) but a lot of it was the same text that fell between the cracks and wasn’t covered by the ASCII hack. Much help goes to 7743 for helping us out with tips that eventually made it all click and save the project.

We released an April Fools day early build of this without the dots on the letters for a quick laugh and intended to distribute the real deal days later, but we discovered last minute text crashes and softlocks in various pieces of text. The prank was noticed by some official Arabic language localizers on social media, and that made our day and probably motivated us for that last lap, so thanks for them.

And now here we are. The final patch is now live, as a BPS patch. We also finished the scanlation project for Hasha no Tsurugi wrapping up loose ends from when it all begun. We’re really grateful we were afforded the opportunity, the will and the good fortune to finish this project, and for all the good friends we met on that path.

28 Likes

an arabic patch would look cool on the paper but you need to be at the utmost focus because it migh run with few errors and text glitches that unless you had been covering everything