Added English mode

2022/12/24

About English mode

  • English mode has been added. You can now switch between Japanese and English.
  • In English mode, the story text is translated into English.

How to enter English mode

  • A new screen has been added for initial startup. Pressing B on this screen will start the game in English, pressing A will start it in Japanese.
  • If data exists in the save slot, this screen will not appear at startup. But, after starting the game, you can still switch languages by pressing the X button, at the settings screen.
  • See the video below for instructions on how to switch languages after starting the game.

About the translation quality

  • The translated text depends on machine translation (Powered by DeepL) and a few tweaks.
  • My first language is Japanese, so my English may seem strange to native speakers. But I expect it to be still easier to understand for English speakers than displaying Japanese.
  • You are welcome to point out grammatical errors.
  • I implement this because I believe it is important to first create a system that can display the translated text. If you think the translation quality is poor, I would appreciate your help.

About the translation policy

  • The translation in this mode, the priority is to convey the nuances of the original text. I won't make it an overly staged translation to fit English-speaking culture.
  • Idiomatic phrases that are deeply rooted in Japanese culture are translated by interpreting their meanings. ex: the title of Chapter 17B "５月の雨" (Rain in May) is "The Intermittent Rain".
  • For the spelling of proper nouns, I have adopted what I think is closest to the Japanese Kana notation from old official translations, fan translations, Heroes, myths, and names of real people etc.
  • I do not adopt already spell of existing words for people's names. (ex: "リーフ" should be "Leif", not "Leaf".)
  • The names of places have been adapted to the descriptions on the map. Place names are left as they are, even if they are spelled the same as the real ones.

Screenshots

At the game start, you can choose between classic and casual mode.
Added a historical background description in prologue.
The story what if it was Ishtore instead of Leidrik who was in Manster.
Some of the joining units are changed.
Another units may join if certain conditions are met.

Acknowledgements

The implementation of English mode was triggered by the extension of available character types by fe5_dialogue_font.asm included in fe5_patch. Thank you very much.

I have ported the English fonts for dialog and menu display from Lil'Manster, an overseas translation patch. And MenuTextFormatter.py included in the Lil'Manster build file is used to generate the menu font images. Thanks for their hard work. (I use that files with some modifications.)