Greetings Yas Forums. This is a weekly progress report on the current state of my attempt at a fan translation for Alphadream's 2nd most overlooked title, Tomato Adventure Kotobattle is the 1st, and it's literally not possible to translate to English.
Current Stats: >1794/3030 known dialogues translated >Menus, items, enemies, are being disregarded for the time being as the script is more important
Changes, challenges and other interesting facts >Some typographical errors fixed, as I encounter them during video footage capture. Call this the "proofreading" and "editing" step if you will. >Control code and formatting randomly gets eaten in the process of inserting the English text into the game, so weird text anomalies happen >In order to capture footage/webms to share with Yas Forums, I am now having to split the dialogue up on an area-by-area basis, as for some unknown reason, trying to insert the master text file about halfway through. This is a huge fucking pain, but I'm doing it. Why not. >The game still softlocks whenever it wants. I've been slowly going through it, extensively documenting where and what causes crashes, and making clever use of savestates to bypass problem areas.
The current outlook is, basically, once the translation work is all finished, it's going to require extensive hacking to make this thing real. We'll cross those bridges as we arrive at them, but there's still around 1200 dialogue entries remaining... that are known at this point in time.
Ask questions, post comments, talk about the game. I will be posting selected webms from the game coming up, to prove that this is in a very partially working state, despite the technical hangups.
Note that further tweaking and editing will be done as I go along. There aren't too many odd spots, but occasionally (while driving, in the shower, etc) a cooler, better, more interesting way to convey an idea or thought springs to mind.
That game looks like really nice. Can't wait to see it when its done.
Kayden Reed
It's an OK game that is blown out of the water by the more refined Mario & Luigi RPG/Superstar Saga games, but it's still worth playing. The story and locations are all over the place, which on the one hand is jarring, but at the same time is quite charming.
Thanks for the hard work OP. I get the feeling with the hacking that needs to be done to fix it, its a matter of if you build it they will come. Once everythings translated its only a matter of time before some GBA programming whiz comes by and fixes it up. Can't wait, thanks for the work OP.
Lincoln Thomas
Thank you for your kind words. That is sort of how I would expect it to play out as well. Once the "hard work" is done, if this catches the eye of just the right person in some romhacking community, there's a chance this could be made to work. I'm neither programmer nor hacker, so my skillset is not geared towards that side. Unfortunately, even the Tomato guy himself gave up on this project because, well, 3000+ dialogue entries is no walk in the park. Well, during this lockdown it is, but on a normal day...
I hadn't heard of it until just now. Game actually looks pretty interesting. Putting it on my "to play" list for once I'm finally done using all my gaming time on translating Tomato Adventure.
Well. Good luck. Hopefully nothing unfortunate happens.
Leo Lopez
Hey OP, did you know that Superstar Saga had some references to Tomato Adventure? The Giant Crab boss is based on an enemy from TA, and the theme song for TA is in the files for SSS.
Can't believe I wasted quads on a webm where the control code let me down. It says "don't forget to save" but I guess I fucked up and put a "break" rather than a "wait" there, so when you mash A to blow through the text, it just skips to the next available "wait" prompt. Sad sad day.
I played Superstar Saga a TON when I was younger, so I'm very pleased with the references and other things that they snuck into M&L. Alphadream, in their prime, were a wondeful bunch. It's a shame what happened to them... but it is what it is. This post is the last Webm I have for now, Sunday is my "day off" from doing actual work on this. At this point in time, I have the game text up through Onions City completed, so the real cool stuff is next on the menu. The entire art gallery part of the game is 100% worth it even if the rest of the game isn't to one's taste.
Thanks for all that you do user! Is there anywhere else you're posting updates about this I can keep up with? I don't browse Yas Forums much nowadays but Tomato Adventure is a game I've been meaning to play for years.
Adam Jones
Oh, cool. Always wanted to try this game out. Godspeed, user.
Henry Murphy
I'm afraid I am not documenting this on any blog or website. Outside of these threads which I will post here as I go along my way, there are no other places to keep up with the ongoing status of this project.
I always like that a lesser known title gets made and then later spawns a game that shares a lot of similarities, but was much more popular. > Tonic Trouble and Rayman 2 >For the Frog the Bell Tolls and Link's Awakening >Tomato Adventure and Superstar Saga >Pulseman and Pokemon >Mark of Kri and God of War Even in animation, stuff like Larry & Steve and SMFA gave us Family Guy and Uncle Grandpa.
Samuel Powell
It's awesome that Alphadream got the Mario IP to work with for Superstar Saga. I think that really helped give them incentive to really tighten up the gameplay and make something far above the level they would have otherwise made. Not sure if that's because Nintendo themselves had closer oversight on the project or what, but the results were very good. Tomato Adventure really was sort of them throwing darts at the board and seeing where things landed. There's a lot of gimmicks which outright suck or are pointless to use at any point (most Dokidoki/Excite gimmicks honestly) or ones that are flat out OP (Rabbit Shoes for example). I will say, do NOT use a Switch Pro Controller to play this. The Dpad sucks ass and it really shows when trying to use the K-Wanwan/Dojo Pup. Can't tell you how many times I've failed that due to missed diagonals.
Still sad that Pic related is, for all intents and purposes, untranslatable for reasons I'll explain in the next post.
Is this something you do weekly? Can we expect a new update next week?
Thomas Torres
you should post on /vr/ and maybe rhdn
Lucas Ramirez
Pic related is a good example what makes Kotobattle a "translation never ever" game. It relies inherently on the existence of Kanji as a gameplay mechanic. It would take a localizer of the absolute highest caliber to even attempt this unless they just didn't care and said "deal with it, learn some damn Kanji dumb EOPs" which might not actually be the worst route.
I will make efforts to post the latest on the project every Sunday. The translation itself is way, way ahead of what I have video footage for.
Alexander Rogers
One thing though, those text boxes are tiny. You can barely fit 3-4 words on a line. Did you have end up rephrasing everything to fit in?
Angel Myers
You can squish a cool 18 characters (including spaces) into one line of text. I've been really trying not to get into hyphenating hell, and have been carefully considering the pacing of WAIT/BREAK line commands so that nobody skips over anything important by accident. Hopefully once we're into the hacking phase, some kind soul might find a way to do some kind of Golden Sun-esque variable width font, or perhaps find a way to expand the text boxes.
Pic related is the pain and suffering I must endure as I do this.
I've actually just thought of a really awful, but plausible way this could be done... but it would not be fitting of the time when the game was originally launched. You could PROBABLY get away with turning all the Kanji into Emojis since those can convey meaning while also taking on different "readings" when placed next to other things (and would convey a similar feeling to how it's like to read Kanji, if horribly screwed up).
I seriously hope nobody does this though.
Daniel Turner
That's nice, some other person is currently translsting the GBA Starfy games, so it's nice to see others tackle various untranslated games. Good luck OP.
Parker Perry
damn this shit looks like super star saga the alpha
