Star Hearts: Hoshi to Daichi no Shisha

What’s translated

• The whole script: every story event, the fairy and creature scenes, the narrated prologue and the ending.
• Every menu: magic, animal abilities, weapons and armor with their charms, Talismans, Amulets, equipment items, key items, events, status, the fairy list, the Arts list, options and the e-Pet screen; item, spell and Arts names and descriptions; shops and the smith.
• Everything drawn as a picture: the title, the new-game screens, the menu headings, the item prompts, the atlas cards shown when you first reach a country, and the map screen.
• Speaker name tags and map labels now show full names (Leprechaun, Sagittarius, Inde Village, Ousa’s Tent), drawn in narrow letters made for this patch; the original’s tags allowed only 8 letters.
• Link cable: the pet battles work between two English cartridges and between the English patch and a Japanese cartridge, in both directions. During a link battle your pet’s name is shown in full-width letters so a Japanese console can read it.
• WonderGate: the Gate Bazaar’s membership, visitor counters and error messages.
• A few characters suddenly speak English in the original (“I AM YOUR FATHER”); those lines keep the original’s wide full-width letters.

Hidden names

Like the original, the name screen reacts to some names. Japanese names typed on the kana pages give the original’s results. English names have their own list:

• VJUMP (or Vjump, VJump, V-Jump, V-JUMP): the V-Jump magazine code. Your hero starts with 140 Life and Magic and every stat at 7.
• Rows of a’s: a, aa, aaa … aaaaaaaa (or A … AAAAAAAA) become Lazybone, Meh, LAZY, LAZIER, LAZIEST, Couch, Zzzzz… and No Drive.
• The names the original already accepted in Latin letters or digits, now typed in English: hi-ge, tai-pin, mi-na, tsu-yo, gunpey, kao, KAO, hiromi, toshibo, exe, DGM, GM, gO, RPG, 110 (also 911), 177 and 1242 (mostly the developers’ nicknames and phone-number jokes).
• Zelda, Link and Shiren are refused (XXX), as in the original; Ultraman, Baltan, Miffy, Kyonkyon, Kimutaku, Mipolin, Noripi and chacha have their jokes.

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

• Claude translated everything directly from the Japanese in the ROM and did all the hacking. The ROM grows from 4 to 8 MiB to hold the English. The game’s text renderer draws English with variable widths, the speaker tags and map labels got a new variable-width renderer, and the game’s runtime messages (item pickups, numbers, link errors) were fitted to English.
• Nine separate Claude reviewers checked the whole game against the Japanese, scene by scene and list by list. Their findings were verified and fixed.
• On screen: every one of the 10,238 text boxes was drawn in the game’s real box with the widest names and checked for overflow and leftover Japanese. Random walks covered 69 maps with every story flag set and a full inventory, with the original ROM as a control. All 479 maps were loaded, 531 graphics archives were examined for lettering, 12 minutes of the attract loop were recorded, and every menu, the shop, the save and continue screens, game over and the staff roll were compared side by side with the original for alignment.
• Link cable: complete pet battles on two linked emulated consoles, English-English, English-Japanese and Japanese-English.
• Online: the WonderGate Bazaar was played for real against a private copy of Swan Revival’s server, on both the original and the English ROM, including the 1,000th-visitor prize and a refused connection. The live server was not used for testing.
• The judgement calls (names, terms, jokes, sensitive material, abbreviations) were listed with the Japanese and the options, and I decided all 106 by hand over four rounds.

Things to know

• Start a new game: a save from the Japanese version keeps its Japanese names.
• The cartridge header now declares the 32 KB of save memory the game really uses, so saves work in emulators and on flash carts (the original’s header claims 8 KB and loses the end of every save).
• The game asks for your real birthday at the start and uses your real age in a few lines: if you are in your thirties, a child asks “By the way, big bro, are you married?”. This is kept as in the original, whichever hero you play.

Changelog

• v1.1: the title screen’s subtitle is redrawn in the style of the Japanese one (cream letters, dark outline, soft shadow).
• v1.0: first release.

Sources consulted

• Japanese text: the WonderSwan Color ROM itself.
• Mythological and astronomical names (Gae Bolg, Claíomh Solais, Manannan mac Lir, the zodiac): their usual English spellings.
• WonderGate behaviour: the game’s code and Swan Revival’s notes on this game.

How to patch

Apply star-hearts-en-1.1.bps to the Japanese ROM “Star Hearts - Hoshi to Daichi no Shisha (Japan)” (CRC32 138D1018) in your browser with the Swan Revival patcher, or with Floating IPS, beat or ROM Patcher JS. The result is an 8 MB ROM with CRC32 C2F3CCBD (SHA-1 0a765180c8f35f5e1123939e25d284aec1a7bc8f).

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: star-hearts-en-1.1.bps on the release page.

Known issues

• It hasn’t been played start to finish by a person. The opening, the first areas, the menus, shops, saving, continuing and game over were played; later areas were reached by random walks with every story flag set. The final battle and the ending scenes were not played to: their text was checked in the game’s own boxes, and the staff roll was seen on screen. The music room was not reached; its titles were checked the same way. If you find leftover Japanese or anything broken, please tell me where it happened.
• Link Cable needs a hatched pet. Choosing it without one crashes the game, as it does in the original.
• Bandai’s WonderGate server is long gone. Swan Revival’s server supports this game’s Gate Bazaar.

Technical notes (for the curious)

• The English needs more room than the Japanese, so the ROM grows from 4 MB to 8 MB; the English text lives in the added half.
• The game’s dialogue renderer draws English letters with variable widths. The speaker name tags and map labels had a separate tile-based renderer limited to 8 characters; it was replaced with a variable-width one and a narrow font, so tags and labels show full names.
• The name screen’s hidden names are checked by the original code against Japanese kana; a hook adds a second table for the English names, including the V-Jump code.
• English letters use codes the Japanese font doesn’t have. For Link Cable play, the pet’s name is converted to full-width letters (which both versions can draw) when the link mode starts, and back when it ends; the link mode never saves the pet record, so the save only ever holds the English codes.
• The title’s subtitle is a picture. Drawn in the original’s outlined style, the English needs more tiles than the logo’s graphics hold, so a small hook on the title’s loading code copies the rest into video memory the title screen leaves unused.
• The original’s cartridge header declares 8 KB of save memory, but the game writes 32 KB. The header now declares 32 KB, so emulators and flash carts keep the whole save.
• The game copies an item’s name into the “obtained!” message through a buffer with no length check, and a longer name would overwrite the message. Every English item name fits in 9 character codes (two letters can share one code) and 84 pixels, and the build refuses a longer one.