Pocket Fighter

What’s translated

• Story mode: every opening, rival meeting and ending (36 scenes, 274 pages), and the conversations shown over the fight stages.
• Fights: all 193 win quotes and the CONTINUE? hints.
• Cards: the 131 card names (GET CARD and Point Battle), and every picture in Card Battle: the card plates and categories, the 77 move names, the comparison icons (INI / ATK / REC / EVA) and the link messages.
• Menus drawn as pictures: the title menu’s CARD BATTLE and CARD GALLERY buttons (hand-drawn in the style of the game’s own English menu lettering) and the Card Gallery name plates.
• WonderGate: every screen of the online service: the agreement, connection prompts and status, Customer ID, service and prepaid menus, the phone-number screens and buttons, rankings and download results, and all the error messages, including the numbers and amounts the game prints into them.
• Left as it is: the game’s own English menus and staff roll, the katakana subtitle under the title logo, and the signs drawn in the stage art.

Names and terms

Characters and moves use Capcom’s official English names: Hsien-Ko (and her sister Mei-Ling), Tessa and Akuma, including the name plates the cartridge lettered LEI-LEI, TABASA and GOUKI, which were redrawn from the game’s own letters. Moves follow Capcom’s current spellings (Hadoken, Shoryuken, Tatsumaki Senpukyaku). Game terms are the English release’s: Gems, Mighty Combo, Flash Combo, Guard Crush.

WonderGate: we don’t charge for anything

Pocket Fighter was made for Bandai’s Mobile WonderGate, a paid online service that closed in 2001. The patch keeps its WonderGate screens as the game wrote them: the paid-service agreement, the prepaid-card menus, the fee lines (“This service costs 500 yen for 10 uses.”) and the balance screens. Today these features work again through Swan Revival (swanrevival.com), the community’s WonderGate revival, and it is free: no prepaid card, scratch code or payment is needed, and the service screens report it as free of charge. Through it the game uploads scores and downloads the national rankings, the digital cards and the Extra modes.

Extras Unlocked edition

A second patch opens the six modes of Option > Extra (Training Mode, Sound Test, Event Test, Reset Mode, Command List, Password Fighter) without a WonderGate download. Event Test plays every story scene and the staff roll. The standard patch leaves them locked, as the game does.

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

• Claude extracted every text table and rendered every graphic in the 2 MB ROM, and wrote the translation in passes: drafts, three review passes, a polish pass checked by a separate agent, and fixes for the space each screen has.
• A separate, independent Claude reviewer read the whole game against the Japanese; its 25 findings were verified and fixed.
• On screen: every text box was drawn in the real game box (every story page through the game’s hidden Event Test menu, every win quote, hint, card name, Card Battle picture and WonderGate message); play-throughs of every mode found no Japanese tile on the English build (the same check finds it on the original); ten minutes of the attract demo were captured on both ROMs.
• Online: the WonderGate session was played for real against a private copy of Swan Revival’s server on both the original and the English ROM (score upload, all five downloads, and a real connection error): the requests, the server’s replies and the hang-up are the same on both. The live server was not used for testing.
• The judgement calls (names, terms, abbreviations, the paid-service text, the pictures) were listed with the Japanese, a literal reading and the options, and I decided all 22 by hand.

Changelog

• v1.0: first release.

Sources consulted

• Japanese text: the WonderSwan ROM itself.
• English names and terms: Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix and Capcom’s current move lists (Capcom Fighting Collection, Street Fighter V).
• WonderGate behaviour: the game’s code and Swan Revival’s notes on this game.
• Lettering: Shinonome 12-dot (public domain) for the text; the name plates are built from the game’s own letters; the title buttons and a few labels are hand-drawn.

How to patch

Apply pocket-fighter-en-1.0.bps to the Japanese ROM “Pocket Fighter (Japan)” (CRC32 35361250) in your browser with the Swan Revival patcher, or with Floating IPS, beat or ROM Patcher JS. The result should be CRC32 A20ED743. For the Extras Unlocked edition, apply pocket-fighter-en-extras-1.0.bps instead (CRC32 624C7B55).

The patched ROM is 4 MB (the original is 2 MB). It’s a WonderSwan (mono) game, so keep the .ws extension.

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

Download: pocket-fighter-en-1.0.bps and pocket-fighter-en-extras-1.0.bps on the release page.

Known issues

• It hasn’t been played start to finish by a person. If you find leftover Japanese or anything broken, please tell me where it happened.
• Link-cable play (Card Battle link matches and card trading) is translated but couldn’t be tested with a second unit.
• WonderGate screens the revival doesn’t produce (fees, prepaid balances and top-ups, server-side error codes) were checked with test values, not real ones.
• The digital cards have no names in the game (in the Japanese too), so their name line stays empty.
• Saves made with the Japanese game keep their default record holders’ initials (LEI and TBS); a new save shows HSK and TES.

Technical notes (for the curious)

• English is drawn with a proportional font: each line is pre-rendered into 8x16 cells at build time, and the game’s own text routines draw the cells in place of Japanese characters.
• The story script, the WonderGate messages and the edited pictures were moved into a new 2 MB half of the ROM, which is why the patched ROM is 4 MB.
• Several limits had to be found on screen: hint and story pages that share sprite tiles with the fighters, a WonderGate window of 63 letter tiles, an 18-letter line for the amounts the server sends, and pictures that have only as many tiles as the screen leaves before the next one.
• The routine that prints WonderGate amounts printed Japanese units after the numbers; it was rewritten to print English.