From TV Animation One Piece: Niji no Shima Densetsu

What’s translated

• The whole script, over 11,000 lines: the story over nine chapters, the opening narration, every town and island conversation, the crew’s chats, battle tutorials and Quest Words, the ending and the epilogue.
• Every menu and screen: the Logbook (save) screens, name entry, the START menu, Stats, the move lists and move info, the Marks of Friendship screens, Battle Party, the sea chart, the wanted posters, the ranking board, all the battle screens and messages, GAME OVER and the staff credits (paced to the ending music as in the original).
• The pictures with words in them, redrawn by hand in the original style: the title logo’s subtitle (Legend of Rainbow Island), the boot copyright notice, the sound-effect lettering (BOOM!!, WHAM!, SLASH!, SNAP!!, BAM!! and the rest), Sanji’s COOK’S SOUL cut-in and THE END.
• Name entry has English letters; names are up to four capital letters, as in the original.

Names and terms

Characters, places and attacks use the official English names from the VIZ manga and the English anime (Zoro, Koby, Karoo, the Going Merry, Loguetown, the Marines, Gum-Gum Pistol, and Sanji’s kicks under their French names: Collier Shoot, Mouton Shot…), checked against the One Piece Wiki and matching my other One Piece patches. Names that exist only in this game keep a faithful romanization of the game’s own Japanese (Atori, Legas, Dokudamin…). The release notes in the game’s folder list every place where the English differs from the original, such as the “Rainbow Island / Carrot Island” mishearing joke, which becomes “Rhubarb Island” so it still sounds like “Rainbow”, and the original Japanese of the six “friendship words” the crewmates tell you.

How it was made: AI translation, independent checks, human decisions

• Claude translated and reviewed every line against the Japanese in the ROM, polished the wording, made repeated lines match, and did the hacking: an English font, an 8 MB ROM, English name entry and the redrawn pictures. (An earlier draft of this project used another AI; Claude re-reviewed all of it and about one line in five was corrected.)
• A separate, independent Claude reviewer checked the whole game against the Japanese; its findings were verified and fixed.
• On screen: every text box of the script drawn in the game’s own boxes with every character the game drew logged (13,423 pages, no Japanese, nothing cut off); a random walk through menus, maps and dialogue looking for any Japanese that reached the screen (none); the attract mode watched from power-on; the ending and credits played to the end of the music; and every screen compared with the Japanese, enlarged, for centring and spacing.
• The judgement calls (names, terms, the wordplay, abbreviations, the redrawn pictures, the special edition) were listed with the Japanese, a literal reading and the options, and I decided all 26 by hand over four rounds.

The special edition: the developers’ debug mode

The developers left a debug mode in the game that the retail cartridge always switches off at power-on. The special edition (one-piece-niji-en-special-1.0.bps) is the same English patch with it switched on:

• Chapter select: on the sea chart (at a new game or the start of a chapter), after the ship stops, press B. X1/X3 choose STAGE 01-09 and A starts that chapter.
• In battle, at a turn’s command input: hold START and press Y1/Y3 to switch to another of the game’s 81 battles; hold B and press A to win the battle at once (rewards and level-ups follow).
• Viewers: at PUSH START, hold B and press START for a map viewer (all 90 maps), or hold Y3 (Y-pad down) for a picture viewer (the 52 cut-in pictures). In the field, Y3 opens a flag editor and Y4 shows the blocked squares. Holding B during dialogue skips the letter-by-letter delay.
• Limits: it’s the developers’ leftover tool. The viewers are dead ends: reset to leave them. Holding B or Y3 at PUSH START sends you into a viewer, so don’t hold them there if you want to play. The flag editor and chapter select use the developers’ own abbreviations (SNCNT, EFLAG…), and the picture viewer includes one unused picture with a tiny Japanese tag. Changing flags or jumping chapters can put the game in states it was never meant to reach. Play the standard patch for the actual game.

Changelog

• v1.0: first release.

Sources consulted

• Japanese text: the WonderSwan Color ROM itself.
• Official English names: the VIZ manga and the English anime, as recorded on the One Piece Wiki.

How to patch

Apply the BPS to the Japanese ROM “From TV Animation One Piece - Niji no Shima Densetsu (Japan)” (CRC32 427056C4) in your browser with the Swan Revival patcher, or with Floating IPS, beat or ROM Patcher JS:

• Standard: one-piece-niji-en-1.0.bps, the result should be CRC32 AD5D5163.
• Special edition (debug mode on): one-piece-niji-en-special-1.0.bps, the result should be CRC32 42912FF4.

The patched ROM is 8 MB (the original is 4 MB): the English needs more room, so the patch doubles the ROM. Use an emulator or a flash cart that takes 64 Mbit WonderSwan Color ROMs. It’s a WonderSwan Color game, so keep the .wsc extension.

You must provide your own copy of the original Japanese game to apply it.

Download: one-piece-niji-en-1.0.bps, one-piece-niji-en-special-1.0.bps on the release page.

Known issues

• It hasn’t been played start to finish by a person, and it was tested on emulators, not on real hardware. If you find leftover Japanese, cut text or a crash, please tell me where it happened.
• A few things were checked without being seen in normal play: the final boss battle (its text was drawn in the game’s own boxes and the screens around it were played), the Whisky Peak island map, the departure narration on the sea chart, and three sound-effect pictures (TWINKLE, SHOCK!, GA-BOOM!) and the healing bubble, which were redrawn and checked in their graphics but never caught on a frame.
• The screen a mono WonderSwan shows for this colour-only game was not tested.

Technical notes (for the curious)

• The game draws text as 12x12 kana and kanji. The patch adds narrow 6x12 letters, drawn in pairs so that two English letters fill each cell, which gives the English twice the room on every line.
• The ROM is expanded from 4 MB to 8 MB: the game runs from the upper half and the English font and script live in the lower half, and the game finds each line through a directory keyed by the original line’s address, so the original pointer tables stay as they are.
• The pictures with words in them are stored either compressed or as plain tiles; the redrawn versions go back in the same form (recompressed in the game’s own format where needed).
• The special edition differs from the standard patch in two boot bytes (which keep the debug flag on) and one routine that makes the debug battle select read each battle’s text from its own chapter.