This is a new translation of FE2. I couldn’t help myself giving it such a stupid punny name.
The original fanslation was by Artemis251, and this is built on that script and that ROM, though heavily modified.
Features:
Expanded script compared to the old translation. Due to space restrictions doesn’t have the full Japanese script, but is much closer to complete.
Font from the official English FE1 version
Echoes names, though still the original Gaiden dialogue
I am well aware that this is not fully polished when it comes to formatting. In just the screenshot above, for example, the text could fit within two lines. And there’s space to squeeze in a few more lines in some places. Overall this is perfectly playable though. And the odds anyone cares enough about FE2 of all things for me to go through the script is very low.
YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
when fe3 got that new patch i knew it was only a matter of time until the last game stuck with an old and ugly patch got its day. this is actually huge
fire emblem gaiden is my favorite video game of all time. if you need me to go through the game and look for stuff just tell me what to look out for and i will gladly boot the game up again and play through it
This is really awesome! I for one would totally appreciate any further polishing you’d do! I think Gaiden deserves to have a really definitive updated translation. Lopo was working on a really promising one on SF, but I assume lost interest.
So seeing yours has me very excited! Gonna keep a tab on this for my own future play through.
I would love to play this as my first run through Gaiden. But after two minutes of play, I found the font far too difficult to read. After checking the previous translation, the names were outdated, but it was far more legible. Sorry.
What the game needs is dictionary compression, or at least dual-tile encoding, which allows you to use 1 or 2 bytes to store an entire word. This’ll let you not have to use the mashed font characters. Also, you may already know, but be aware that all the game’s menu windows should be expandable without too much effort.
It’s made by branching off the existing text-copying routine to check what byte has been copied from the text bank. If it’s the dictionary value, then check the next value and use that as the index number to get the pointer and read some text data from the dictionary area instead. That’s what allowed me to cram so much text into FE1. Having worked with Gaiden before back when I wanted to translate it, I can say that it’s very similar to FE1 under the hood. However, Gaiden doesn’t have the advantage of giant swathes of unused space, so you’d have to probably write some compression for other parts of the game or do some bank-switching to whatever space you can find.
Only encountered one issue so far, Sonya(boss) attacking on enemy phase will hardlock the game after combat. I also know of one other person to have this issue.
It appears to be a bug from the old translation patch, related to the spell excalibur. So Project Dumasday inherited the glitch? The answer is not that simple though.
It seems the excalibur glitch was thought to be an issue only the old J2E patch. The Artemis patch that I used as a base did not use J2E as base though, as the old J2E patch was known to have bugs like this. In hindsight I myself should have used the original Japanese ROM as a base, but this translation started as me casually updating names in the existing patch for a playthrough, and grew from there.
So that leaves three possibilities. The first appears the least likely, that I caused the bug. It’s unlikely as I didn’t edit any code, but solely text. In my playthrough I fought Sonya as well as used Mage Tobin and never encountered this excalibur glitch.
Second possibility is that J2E and Artemis patches independently caused similar bugs. Of course J2E was known for glitches with excalibur, as well as ragnarok, but there was also a more recent 2020s Reddit post reporting the Excalibur glitch on an unspecified translation, that could have been the Artemis one.
Third possibility is that its a vanilla FE2 bug. I wasn’t able to find any information by searching in Japanese.
As far as fixing it, the Reddit thread suggests the patch may have been applied incorrectly. I used Floating IPS to create the patch, so try patching Dumasday over Japanese Gaiden using that and hopefully the save file can be carried over to the new ROM with the same file name.
