(June 14, 2020)
~~New patch, 1.01 Tony swap. Instances of "Dan" in the script have been replaced with "Tony", and Dan's character portrait while talking has been replaced with Tony's. Script change done by me, in menus and battle messages it will appear as "Tny" due to being still limited to 3 characters. Portrait change done by EvilJagaGenius and I make no claims as to its completeness. Overworld sprite is still Dan for now, sorry! IPS patch is based off of the original unmodded japanese rom, so you should be able to apply it over any iteration of the original or translation.
(Jan 17, 2020)
~~New patch, 1.01. Four minor text fixes. It should be able to be applied directly over the previous patched version, or the original unpatched file. Can be found at the bottom of this post.
(Nov 1, 2019)
~~Normmatt has shown up with a pointer-based translation of the script, which is now combined with my manual translation of menus and non-script things. It should be, of course, perfectly accurate to the original script, as it was included in the game file (meaning with some typos, error characters, and potentially untranslated messages). I'll be including that file up here as well as "Magi Nation (English Translation)", with overall translation completion rate I'd estimate to be at about 97% finished to perfection, and I'll be halting all progress on my manual, abridged translation efforts to instead polish up that joint production.
Major changes that had to be made to the english script were: "Yes Hai" for all yes/no options being reduced to just "Yes", about 16 instances of "Tony" being changed over to " Dan", and dream creature names no longer being in all caps. All instances of "..." were coded as one single character in japanese with no analogue in english, so resulted in a glitchy oversized semicolon looking error character, which I replaced with just a hypen "-". Of the limited punctuation options included in the english font, that best matches the sentiment of a "...", though it does have a bit more sense of urgency/interruption to it. There were also two instances of when you had to pick a response that the english text went beyond its line and into the next one, causing issues, so those were fixed.
~~Update on manual translation (note this patch file is no longer current): All game mechanic relevant things outside of actual script (and a few odd messages here or there) have been translated! I have finished translating the entire main storyline script up through entering the Shadow Geyser in Cald (3rd zone), and the useful NPCs in those first 3 towns. The Lunar IPS file "Magi Nation (English Translation v0.3)" is my old, manual translating of the script before Normatt stepped in. I'll be moving the records of my older, manual, abridged translation efforts to a lower post so that it can be kept for posterity's sake, but not to be confused with the proper, pointer-based translation file that most accurately represents the original game.
Updates of the translation progress will be at the top here as anything new comes out!
_________________________________________
Hello world!
Magi Nation is a game that tried to build on the pokemon/digimon/yugioh/fight using monsters hype of the 2000's. They had a collectible card game, gameboy color game, and even a tv show (crrriiinnnngggeee) all released here in the west. I don't know much about the CCG and could barely make it through an episode of the tv show, but I still have my original gbc cartridge. The video game used the same world of the Moonlands, with 5 main explorable zones and 6 creature "types". Each zone is themed after an element, containing Dream Creatures of that element, and each had a shadow geyser that was causing chaos (plant, ground, fire, water, air, and then shadow for the geyser creatures' element). As a stranger who got sucked into this new world, and being immediately declared as the "Great Magus Kyros" (well, by the same guy that last year said it was the innkeeper who was the great magus kyros), your objective is naturally to find each of the shadow geysers and shut them down, thus saving the world! There's maze-like dungeons both for connecting the zones and within them, and the shadow geysers are set up as puzzle-dungeons that have to be solved to get to their core. Within all of those dungeons are the dream creatures, and as you make your way through the storyline and fight them, you can collect their essence and use that to craft rings that lets you summon your own version of that creature, which make up your "party" and you can fight with them so they level up and become stronger. Although the depth of gameplay is generally more simple and linear than even the original gbc pokemon games, there are some unique battle mechanics and a strong storyline with fun humor that really help it stand out as the cult classic that I've found to be worth playing over and over.
But wait, Aplier, if you say this game is so great, and that it was released for the west, then why do you need to make a thread about translating it into English?
Well, the gameboy COLOR game was released in the west in english, but it was rushed out towards the end, and was re-released as a gameboy ADVANCE game only in Japan. The GBA version is far more polished, with better graphics of the upgraded system, battles that make it look like one creature is fighting another instead of an emulated card game, better menu systems, a second save slot, and more. Oh yeah, and not missing out on HALF A ZONE'S worth of dream creatures, that are uncraftable due to them or their components being left out of the game, including 4 of the strongest legendaries (each element has two "Hyrens" that are dragonish-humanoid legendary creatures, found in a secret area for each zone, and are crafted with a starting level of 50). There are some things that were left out of the GBA version, Senpuu has a guide for the GBA game over on gamefaqs that starts by detailing almost all of the differences between the versions, but the GBA version is overall the better gameplay experience by far. Except for, you know... being in Japanese.
_________________________________________
Which is where I come in! And also where a wild Normmatt appears (I think I found a shiny one, no less) and provides a massive leap forward to this project I was picking back up by integrating his old work of a pointer-based translation into the game. It made obsolete so much of the work on storyline and dream creature/item names I'd done up to that point, but it brought the project from being at like a 30% completed mediocre abridged translation to being a like 95%
completed exactly true to the original translation. So however saddened I may have been to have much of my own work gone to waste, I'm far happier knowing that this game should be completely playable in its current state, with just some polishing and cleaning up to do.
~~New patch, 1.01 Tony swap. Instances of "Dan" in the script have been replaced with "Tony", and Dan's character portrait while talking has been replaced with Tony's. Script change done by me, in menus and battle messages it will appear as "Tny" due to being still limited to 3 characters. Portrait change done by EvilJagaGenius and I make no claims as to its completeness. Overworld sprite is still Dan for now, sorry! IPS patch is based off of the original unmodded japanese rom, so you should be able to apply it over any iteration of the original or translation.
(Jan 17, 2020)
~~New patch, 1.01. Four minor text fixes. It should be able to be applied directly over the previous patched version, or the original unpatched file. Can be found at the bottom of this post.
(Nov 1, 2019)
~~Normmatt has shown up with a pointer-based translation of the script, which is now combined with my manual translation of menus and non-script things. It should be, of course, perfectly accurate to the original script, as it was included in the game file (meaning with some typos, error characters, and potentially untranslated messages). I'll be including that file up here as well as "Magi Nation (English Translation)", with overall translation completion rate I'd estimate to be at about 97% finished to perfection, and I'll be halting all progress on my manual, abridged translation efforts to instead polish up that joint production.
Major changes that had to be made to the english script were: "Yes Hai" for all yes/no options being reduced to just "Yes", about 16 instances of "Tony" being changed over to " Dan", and dream creature names no longer being in all caps. All instances of "..." were coded as one single character in japanese with no analogue in english, so resulted in a glitchy oversized semicolon looking error character, which I replaced with just a hypen "-". Of the limited punctuation options included in the english font, that best matches the sentiment of a "...", though it does have a bit more sense of urgency/interruption to it. There were also two instances of when you had to pick a response that the english text went beyond its line and into the next one, causing issues, so those were fixed.
~~Update on manual translation (note this patch file is no longer current): All game mechanic relevant things outside of actual script (and a few odd messages here or there) have been translated! I have finished translating the entire main storyline script up through entering the Shadow Geyser in Cald (3rd zone), and the useful NPCs in those first 3 towns. The Lunar IPS file "Magi Nation (English Translation v0.3)" is my old, manual translating of the script before Normatt stepped in. I'll be moving the records of my older, manual, abridged translation efforts to a lower post so that it can be kept for posterity's sake, but not to be confused with the proper, pointer-based translation file that most accurately represents the original game.
Updates of the translation progress will be at the top here as anything new comes out!
_________________________________________
Hello world!
Magi Nation is a game that tried to build on the pokemon/digimon/yugioh/fight using monsters hype of the 2000's. They had a collectible card game, gameboy color game, and even a tv show (crrriiinnnngggeee) all released here in the west. I don't know much about the CCG and could barely make it through an episode of the tv show, but I still have my original gbc cartridge. The video game used the same world of the Moonlands, with 5 main explorable zones and 6 creature "types". Each zone is themed after an element, containing Dream Creatures of that element, and each had a shadow geyser that was causing chaos (plant, ground, fire, water, air, and then shadow for the geyser creatures' element). As a stranger who got sucked into this new world, and being immediately declared as the "Great Magus Kyros" (well, by the same guy that last year said it was the innkeeper who was the great magus kyros), your objective is naturally to find each of the shadow geysers and shut them down, thus saving the world! There's maze-like dungeons both for connecting the zones and within them, and the shadow geysers are set up as puzzle-dungeons that have to be solved to get to their core. Within all of those dungeons are the dream creatures, and as you make your way through the storyline and fight them, you can collect their essence and use that to craft rings that lets you summon your own version of that creature, which make up your "party" and you can fight with them so they level up and become stronger. Although the depth of gameplay is generally more simple and linear than even the original gbc pokemon games, there are some unique battle mechanics and a strong storyline with fun humor that really help it stand out as the cult classic that I've found to be worth playing over and over.
But wait, Aplier, if you say this game is so great, and that it was released for the west, then why do you need to make a thread about translating it into English?
Well, the gameboy COLOR game was released in the west in english, but it was rushed out towards the end, and was re-released as a gameboy ADVANCE game only in Japan. The GBA version is far more polished, with better graphics of the upgraded system, battles that make it look like one creature is fighting another instead of an emulated card game, better menu systems, a second save slot, and more. Oh yeah, and not missing out on HALF A ZONE'S worth of dream creatures, that are uncraftable due to them or their components being left out of the game, including 4 of the strongest legendaries (each element has two "Hyrens" that are dragonish-humanoid legendary creatures, found in a secret area for each zone, and are crafted with a starting level of 50). There are some things that were left out of the GBA version, Senpuu has a guide for the GBA game over on gamefaqs that starts by detailing almost all of the differences between the versions, but the GBA version is overall the better gameplay experience by far. Except for, you know... being in Japanese.
_________________________________________
Which is where I come in! And also where a wild Normmatt appears (I think I found a shiny one, no less) and provides a massive leap forward to this project I was picking back up by integrating his old work of a pointer-based translation into the game. It made obsolete so much of the work on storyline and dream creature/item names I'd done up to that point, but it brought the project from being at like a 30% completed mediocre abridged translation to being a like 95%
completed exactly true to the original translation. So however saddened I may have been to have much of my own work gone to waste, I'm far happier knowing that this game should be completely playable in its current state, with just some polishing and cleaning up to do.
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