Graphics Editing & Limited Palettes

Aside from what has been already covered (text space, honorifics, puns, levels of politeness, etc.), have there been any major stumbling blocks throughout the group's translations, current or previous?

Something we haven’t talked much about are how annoying the process for image editing is – particularly the way images are stored and the fact that Japanese grammar runs Subject-Object-Verb (or technically, everything and then Verb final) rather than Subject-Verb-Object like English and uses Kanji to save space, often making things a challenge for us. This is a trial every game patcher working from JPN->ENG has to face.

For instance, in Chronicle we have a graphic like this:

That translates to “Win within [minutes]:[seconds]”. Well, notice how in English the time comes last but it comes first in the Japanese graphic, and the program inserts the numbers in the gaps. How are we going to solve this? We’ll have to see because we’re still working on it. In short though we’ll have to come up with some kind of funny rephrase that works with the Japanese format.

Regarding other struggles with 20th Anniversary: the game coded all images as either in 4bpp, 8bpp, or as a MAP file, which all needed to be extracted/compiled differently. 

Doing it wrong would give you a messed up image, like:

(this was a background image of Primp school)

And then there were just Weird images, like:

(The actual colors in game are something like orange, yellow, and red)

where we just tried to figure out how to extract a version that was good enough to work with. We always used the palettes of the original image coding instead of generating new ones (with the exception the title screen and some of the rules images) so that also meant we had to correct our image edits to only include the colors of the original image or else they would appear transparent. We did that with Aseprite’s palette option.

The way they stored images were also an absolute pain to edit, since a favorite thing of theirs to do was to split things like names down the middle:

In one square or…

…in multiple parts…

And then to make things worse, those parts wouldn’t align perfectly in the actual game; they each had 1px of overlap on the edges. In other words, if you cut it perfectly, a column 1px wide in the middle would disappear.

And also annoying was the fact that they stored images for the top screen and bottom screen differently, so you had to edit multiple sets or make duplicates. Take for instance these menu images:

At first we thought we could just get away with editing the top one, but it turns out that the bottom one was what would display if you chose to reverse the screen you play Puyo on.

And then there was this image, which was literally unsolvable and is the only image we know that remain in Japanese in our patch:

This says “Game Over”. The transparent long strip version, which is used in the default setting (playing field on the bottom) we edited fine:

But we couldn’t edit the square version (appears when playing field is set to top) because they took a shortcut with the Japanese. If you notice, there’s actually 3 characters of ー which is to signify a long vowel in Katakana. Well they figured they could just call that graphic 3 times instead of duplicating it…which means there’s no way we can write “Too Bad!” or anything of the sort.

Is there a phrase that means “game over” in english with a repeating letter in exactly all of those spots? It would have to be 7 letters, with the same letter in spots 2, 5, and 7. After scouring Thesaurus.com for a long time, we decided this was impossible. So sorry if you play this game with the playing field on the top and you decide to give up in story mode.

That was a basic overview of the hell that was 20th Anniversary’s graphics, but you can rest assured there’s all sorts of tomfoolery happening with Chronicle’s graphics as well, though different in nature. 

For example: some menus in Puyo Puyo Chronicle grab background colors from a random pixel in an image.

In the top image, there’s a single bright green pixel near “Ghost Piece”. Whatever color is there is used for the background color as seen in the screenshot below it.

In summary, Sega sucks and we owe a lot to our programmers and image editors.