Xenogears - Script Revision + Term Corrections

This is a work in progress.

This is something I've been wanting to do for a long time. This is a full revision of Xenogears, a classic RPG made by Squaresoft for the original PlayStation and one of my favorite games of all time. Those who have played the game know how poorly translated/localized this game was. Not only there were several mistranslated terms and sentences that didn't even make sense in English, the translation was also full of misspellings and the punctuation was really bad, with several cases of missing commas, periods, exclamation marks and question marks. It's like the localization team didn't even had a spell checker and had to rely on their eyes alone. They also left Japanese characters in the text for no reason (such as "ー" and "～") and replaced the pointy brackets used for highlighting key terms (like <this>) with dashes (like -this-), not knowing what they were actually supposed to mean. Some sites state that this was furigana (which are special characters used to aid those unfamiliar with a specific kanji or those relatively new to the Japanese language, providing its intended reading in either hiragana or katakana), but I have evidence that that's simply not true. Sometimes the developers put kanji within those brackets (such as ヒトの力＜愛＞), which totally debunks that theory. Kanji is never used as a reading for another kanji, period. There was also a bit of censorship, such as "God" being written as "god", even though it's a direct reference to the god of Judaism/Christianity, or "Church" (the institution) being localized as the "Ethos" organization (within semi-quotes every time, again, for no reason). I know that the localization team did this to avoid controversy among religious gamers, but as a religious gamer myself, I don't see a problem, as it is just a game. The Shin Megami Tensei series is far more daring than this game, believe me.

Anyway, this project is supposed to correct all that, while using the official translation as a base. There were a few parts that I had to re-localize because they were far too literal and sounded very unnatural in English. There were also parts I had to re-translate and shorten a bit in order to make the sentences fit better and display the character portraits fine, but these are in the minority.

Project screenshots:

And below are a few tests I did:

What you're not seeing in the images above: apart from renaming Fei as "Fey" (lol), I've added unused character name opcodes to the game's dialog, which make the console's hardware read data from a different offset within the CD. The biggest advantage of doing this is that it saves me a LOT of space. Character name opcodes take up only 2 bytes each, while names like "Emeralda" take up 8 bytes (consider how many times that might appear in the game!). Another advantage is, if a ROM hacker wishes to add a character naming feature to the game, this hack will save you a great deal of effort and time. The problem, however, is that you'd have to name Citan and Emeralda twice while playing the game, because both characters have 2 "characters" of themselves in the game code with different battle sprites each.

Most of the main dialog and battle dialog is done, but I still need to do another proofreading to make sure nothing was forgotten. Also, the menu, the world map and some other battle stuff still need to be done. Updating pointers manually is such a boring task.

I'm not sure if I can finish this alone, but if things don't end well, I'll just hand my work over to someone more capable.