All of these are full retranslations by me, as a handy method of practicing my Japanese. It turns out PS4 needed some moderate adjustments, PS3 was absolutely incoherent, and PS2 needed the fewest changes. Having no idea what I was doing, only what I wanted to do, I relied on Claude Code to run through the various disassemblies by lory90 and implement variable-width font, extract the scripts from the US and JP versions, as well as create an HTML tool for proofreading.
Phantasy Star IV Retranslation
This was my first ROM hack. It was a very fun challenge, full of restarts. I didn't know the disassemblies existed at first, so my original plan was to just use the JP ROM and inject an English script. Once I found the disassembly, it became way easier (a lot less guess-and-check from Claude), and I noticed it had a number of fixes already implemented as well. I also learned just how tightly packed the JP ROM was: nearly right up against 24-megabits, leaving very little room for a new English translation, let alone anything else I wanted to do. This probably explains why there's relatively little text in the English script. Claude started out creating Kosinki and Nemesis decompressors, combining the 8x8 tiles I wanted for names like "Thray" and "Forren", and then it recommended simplifying things and just doing variable-width font, which after some research really seemed like a no-brainer. After I got my hands on the disassembly, I was able to increase the game size to 32-megabits and ignore practically all size-related limits (although my final script did end up being within 100 bytes of the script limit). Unsurprisingly, it took the longest, at around a month.
Featurelist:
- Full VWF
- Faithfully retranslated script, more authentic Tech/Skill/item/party/monster names
- Status messages now show impacted characters (no more " wake up!" and " paralyzed!")
- Removed framerate drops in battle
- Soldier Fiend enemies no longer have the annoying stacking Giresta window and broken animation when silenced (didn't know about this one before, saw it posted on Gamefaqs!)
- Re-added the enemies that were censored from the US release
- Made crits visually inoffensive
If you're curious about my methodology and some of the details, I go into it a bit in this RHDN post: https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=41779.0
I was planning to stop there, PS4 being my favorite console game and all, but someone left a review hoping that I also do PS3 and PS2. Well, all the tooling was already done... shouldn't take too long to mainly translate the script...
Phantasy Star III Retranslation
I have a love-hate relationship with PS3. It was the first game I ever played in the series. My friend's grandma haggled with a vendor at a flea market in Tagalog and talked him down to ten bucks. That sparked an interest in RPGs for my friend and I, and we played this game for years. Little did we know that it was the black sheep of the series, which became painfully obvious after playing the other games. But it's for this reason that it sort of gets a pass for me in many respects. And it has a lot of cool ideas, even if they're not all fleshed out too well: Technique power redistribution, generational quest branches, a "tech versus magic" world, a transformational story reveal. But the script needed a lot of work. Almost nothing found in the US script is actually in the JP source. It's like one of those live-action movie adaptations of an anime, where the main beats still exist, but everything in between makes no sense and lacks both connection and charm. That actually made PS3 rather interesting to translate, because I learned a lot as I went. By this point, I had been introduced to Rebecca Capowski's translated script, and it was suggested to me to just use that. I emailed her, but by the time I heard back, I was nearly done translating anyway (she also said that her skill in Japanese had improved significantly since then and she'd prefer to rewrite it, though she had no spare time as the translator for Persona 6).
On this project, I wanted to go deeper into improvements than I did with PS4, since PS3 was so lacking in QoL and on replaying it, I was reminded of just how many things about the game bothered me. First thing I did was double the save slots: those devs knew exactly what they were doing by only having two save slots, and I say nuts to that! I also didn't like how when enemies attacked, it told you how much damage they did, but not who got hit, so you had to basically be staring at your party's HP the whole time in order to find out. I didn't know what a lot of the Techniques did (aside from "Fanbi", which I once stacked so high Aron was able to kill Dark Force in a single hit), so I wanted some help there... though the original names ended up being even less helpful. I also thought "message scrolling speed" was a weird setting when starting or loading a game, given that text had no animation, so I added a slick smooth scroll just to see if it could be done. I didn't like how when targeting specific enemies, every directional input moved the cursor to the right, instead of the direction you probably intended, so I changed that too. And finally, PS3 is a game where it feels like everything is slow on purpose - walking, even screen transitions - so I sped those up.
Featurelist:
- Full VWF
- Faithfully retranslated script, Tech/item/character/monster names (character names follow the highly-logical Capowski convention)
- Improved battle text for damage, heals, item and Tech effects
- 4 Save slots instead of 2
- Doubled walk speed and halved screen transition time
- Re-enabled the ground parallax scrolling taken out of the US release
- Smooth scrolling text which obeys the message scrolling speed setting
Phantasy Star II: Definitive Edition
This was the third project I did, and I got a little more ambitious with it. I originally considered going really extreme with it, like adding scaling (based on Mental) to Techs, but I didn't know how purist the PS community was. As a developer on the ShieldBattery project, a community platform for Starcraft 1, I'm well aware that players can be extremely and adamantly particular (and vocal!) whenever you make the most minor changes that they believe spit in the face of the original developers' intent, so that awareness runs deep for me. Instead, I'd focus on things that were strictly beneficial and non-controversial. PS2 hackers FlamePurge and EvilJagaGenius asked if I would incorporate the changes from their hacks, which had earned a positive following, and I agreed.
Naturally, my mind went to "why can't most of this stuff be like PS4?", so I went about remaking the Shops, Equip screen, Status screen, Party window, battle damage and healing popups, showing TP costs in combat, and clearing the empty enemy name box when there was only one type of enemy in combat. The popups were useful both for figuring out how much damage individual enemies took from things like Shotguns or Zan, as well as who was actually taking damage from enemy attacks without staring at HP values (the same problem PS3 had). Then I figured the combat message bar had too much scrolling, being a single row, and I expanded it (and in the case of mandatory two rows, expanded it vertically). I always thought the text drew pretty slowly, so I wanted to speed that up, and I thought I could add a Battle and Message Speed menu, which I put under a new Start Button menu, like in PS4. When I was a kid, my friend told me about this exploit he used to use to avoid random encounters if you use the search command every step (the first time I beat the game, I also used this, and yes it's very tedious) - surprisingly nobody in Discord seemed to know this existed - and I fixed that too. I also found it kind of annoying how the Data Memory clerk tells you all about the status of your save files when you launch the game, and a single button input can accidentally have you starting a new game instead, so Continue Game becomes the default selection if any save files exist (also like PS4).
Then, as I was wrapping up, I had a lot of usage to spare for the week, so I threw out this pie-in-the-sky idea just to see if it was possible: what if I could add PS4-style Macros to PS2? They would follow the same rules as standard PS2 combat - no smart targeting for heals, no enforced turn order, heal commands change to attack commands after the first round - so they wouldn't break the game. They'd use the same color indicators as PS4, where unassigned slots were in red, and slots with invalid commands were in amber: a macro with a party member that's not present, an item that's not in a character's inventory, insufficient TP. I was giddy when I saw it working, and surprised myself at how much it actually added to the game. It wasn't just this fun gimmick like in PS4, it saved a ton of manual effort in issuing commands.
I decided to give this project a bit of a bolder name since it has so many new features, and went with "Definitive Edition".
Featurelist:
- Full VWF
- Faithfully retranslated script, more authentic Tech/item/party/monster names
- Battle Macros
- Most menus follow a cleaner, PS4-style layout
- Improved Shop flow (when you decline something in Shops, you don't immediately leave)
- Equipment comparison previews in the Equip menu as well as in Shops
- Damage and healing popups in combat, like in PS4 (this means that instead of just seeing total damage for an AoE attack, you'll see the accurate breakdown)
- Continue/Erase Game are not available if no saves exist; if saves do exist, Continue Game is sorted to the top of the menu.
- Adjustable Battle Speed, Message Speed, and Damage Flash toggle in a new Start Button menu on the field.
- Minor balance changes from PSII Improvement (mostly centered around lategame character viability) from FlamePurge
- Party leader camera lock from EvilJagaGenius
I hope you all enjoy these projects. I found them very fulfilling to work on, having never released a game mod before. I'd like to think I did the series the justice that I felt it always deserved.
I put all my tooling and the patches on GitHub, which you can find here:
https://github.com/ExcalZ/ps2-retranslation
https://github.com/ExcalZ/ps3-retranslation
https://github.com/ExcalZ/ps4-retranslation
