Chou Denki Card Battle: Youfu Makai

What’s translated

• The whole story, all three parts (Crimson Lotus, Cursed Cards, Fusion), as horizontal English prose in place of the vertical Japanese.
• Every card name, the menus (Scenario, Those in the Way, Worthy Rival, Card Craft…), the deck rules, the battle screens, and the save and erase prompts.
• Graphics: the title logo becomes YOUFU MAKAI with the subtitle “Realm of Demon Cards”; the chapter cards; the brush-lettered result screens (DEFEAT, OUT OF CARDS…); and the attribute emblems as letter badges.
• The staff credits, romanized.

Names: the hero of part 1 is never named, so he’s “the Bodyguard”. The two characters who are both read Masami become Masami (the boy) and Lady Masami (the woman in white). Kikuchi’s own characters, such as Gyoshiro Shikabane and Setsura Aki, follow his official English editions. The cards are Demon Cards, the binder is the Demon Book, and a duel is a Demon Duel.

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

• Claude translated the story and cards directly from the Japanese in the ROM, and did all the hacking: the story is stored as pre-drawn text pictures, so every English page was typeset and rendered into the game’s format, along with a new card-name font and the redrawn graphics.
• A second, independent Claude reviewer checked the text against the Japanese, and a final separate review read the whole patch again; the names and story lines it questioned were corrected.
• Every story page was rebuilt from the finished ROM and compared on screen, and a random walk through menus, story, decks and battles found no Japanese reaching the screen.
• The judgement calls were listed with the Japanese, a literal reading and the options, and I decided each one by hand: the logo, names and terms from Kikuchi’s world, the menu titles, uncertain card readings, and a few deliberately ambiguous lines.

Changelog

• v1.0: first release.

Sources consulted

• Japanese text: the WonderSwan ROM itself.
• Names and terms: the official English editions of Kikuchi’s Demon City Shinjuku (Digital Manga, 2011) and Yashakiden (Digital Manga, tr. Eugene Woodbury).

How to patch

Apply youfu-makai-en-1.0.bps to the Japanese ROM “Chou Denki Card Game - Youfu Makai - Kikuchi Shuukou (Japan)” (CRC32 56E2C069) with Floating IPS, beat or ROM Patcher JS. The result should be CRC32 CB5FACF7.

The English ROM is 4 MB (the original is 2 MB), because the English story pages are stored as pictures: use an emulator or a flash cart that takes 32 Mbit WonderSwan ROMs. 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: youfu-makai-en-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, cut text or a crash, please tell me where it happened.
• A few card names are best guesses at readings that no source confirms.

Technical notes (for the curious)

• The original story text is vertical. The English is laid out horizontally and stored as about 330 KB of pre-drawn text cells, which is why the ROM doubled in size; the original image is the upper half of the new ROM, so the game’s own bank settings still find it.
• Card names use a new outlined mixed-case font; names too wide for it fall back to a narrower one.