7th Dragon for Nintendo DS
English Translation Patch v1.01
April 6, 2014

by Geoff Embree

Table of Contents

1. Installation and Disclaimer
2. Translation Notes
3. Technical Notes
4. DeSmuME Crash
5. Credits
6. Version History
7. Tips and Tricks
8. Contact

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1. Installation and Disclaimer
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This patch is an .xdelta file, meant to be applied to an .nds version of the game. Any of several patching utilities will work - I use the simple xdelta UI by KaioShin at http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/598/

You need to obtain an .nds file, the Japanese version of the game, yourself. I can't help you out.

Simply run xdeltaUI.exe, choose the patch, "Source File" (your .nds file), and "Output File" (whatever you want the new patch to be), and press "Patch".

This patch has been tested on PC in DeSmuME and NO$GBA. DeSmuME is graphically superior and recommended. It appears to have a nasty crash late in the game which may prevent completion of the Japanese version, but a cheat code can be entered in the emulator allowing you to advance. NO$GBA has a more muted color palette and fails to display some graphical elements rendered through the 3D engine, but does not have the same crashpoint. I have not tested the patch on hardware or other emulators/platforms (e.g. iOS), so please post your experiences to help other people; the patch appears to be working without issue on most setups.

There's an optional version of the patch, "7th Dragon USA", with a lowered encounter rate and field damage. And there are cheat items available in both versions if you're absolutely fed up with the pain. The goal was to maintain some of the core difficulty while still mitigating aggravation, but since the target audience of the game is masochists, the base patch remains unaltered. If you're savvy enough to transfer your save file, you can switch between the two patched versions as desired.

While your legal obligation is to obtain a copy of 7th Dragon itself, which will likely provide no revenue to the game's creators, I hope that you also consider a new game purchase in order to support the original publisher. With the purchase of Atlus by Sega, I am happy to recommend any Etrian Odyssey game as a next best substitute for 7th Dragon. Buying any Etrian Odyssey, particularly Etrian Odyssey Untold or Etrian Odyssey 4, shows your appreciation for the game and sends a clear message to Sega that there is a commercial market abroad for 2D-ish dungeon crawlers with great translations.

This translation patch and accompanying works are released under the Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain Dedication. However, while the patch is released as a derivative work of 7th Dragon under the fair use exemption into the public domain, and I waive all of my own rights, the original rights holders for 7th Dragon retain all rights to 7th Dragon, and virtually any use of this work by anyone else is likely still subject to a determination of fair use. I merely mean that the portion original to me is usable without payment, notification, or attribution, by anyone.

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2. Translation Notes
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This translation is a compromise, given limited time and ability. I hope players will forgive my indulgence in translating the game myself, which was a way to improve my Japanese and keep the project a total secret. I was surprised at how charming the original was, and tried hard to preserve that in my translation. But this is not even in the same league as the Etrian Odyssey localizations or top-tier fan efforts.

While bits of Japanese text remain in the game, their meaning is generally redundant. For example, the Japanese text in the class selection screen just says "Fighter", "Rogue", "Mage", etc. The full-screen splash screens do provide a quick blurb about the town (e.g. Miross Federation, "Beautiful City").

The Marero and Rushean languages were represented by running original text through a many-to-one cipher in order to give them a distinct feel. One NPC in the game speaks Aizo, which is actually represented by Chinese in the original game. I couldn't reproduce those characters with font limitations without a lot of work, so I just romanized the text (and truncated and probably totally butchered it, sorry Chinese-speaking players).

I plan to publicly release my translation worksheets for this project for use in multilingual translation and/or retranslation. Unfortunately, because I got lucky with the font encoding and size constraints, and because this was a solo project, this patch doesn't feature the text compression and expanded font encoding that would make non-English translation a breeze. But anyone is free to use my work for any purpose they see fit, be it translation, retranslation, or just recreational nitpicking.

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3. Technical Notes
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7th Dragon has an imposing reputation, with several reasons floated as to why it hadn't been (or couldn't be) translated, but thanks to some exceptional tools, the technical side was much more manageable than I'd feared. I'm not that great a hacker but it was very doable. (So yes, it really was just considered too hard for non-Japanese gamers!)

The main reason for its bad reputation is the text encoding. Every file in 7th Dragon has its own font and encoding for kanji, including each of the 276 event files.  This made extracting the script difficult, because while the hex "82A0" could be relied on to always mean the same hiragana character every time it appeared, the hex "8407" referred to a different character almost every time, one only discernable by visual inspection of the font file.

Thankfully, the standard OCR in Crystal Tile 2 was able to handle these fonts perfectly, so I just had to scan in hundreds of fonts and write some code to properly parse the text. This was a complete godsend, and I certainly could not have finished on time without CT2.

Another stroke of luck was the prior existence of an 8-bit encoding for hiragana in the 0x27-0x7A range.  This saved some headache rewriting routines and allocating RAM, although there was still plenty of work to be done.  Use of sprite text was limited, which is always a relief, and as usual, NO$GBA was an excellent debugging tool.

Any RPG worth playing is going to be a pain to hack, but to use the analogy of a break-in, translating 7th Dragon was like scaling a huge fence and finding an open side door; much preferable to a house accessible only by a locked 18" x 24" crawl space (Mother 3) or completely filled by angry bees (Ys V).

As a critical step toward reproducing the inimitable efficiencies of the Japanese gamesoft development environment, I did most work in Microsoft Excel, including extraction and insertion. The translation workbooks are capable of directly editing the extracted game files, which can then be pasted in with a hex editor.

Features include a few sizes of VWF, some sprite font welding, a lot of centering kludges, and a surprisingly small amount of graphical editing, although the map images and credits took some time. Sadly lacking are substantially lengthened skill names, which caused enough overflow issues that I just opted to leave them alone, along with lengthened character and guild names. Some of the image editing on maps is still yucky. Graphics aren't my strong suit, and these were a little complicated because of palette issues, as well as the sheer number of maps to edit. You may notice some Bloom obscuring map names, which is an unpleasant side effect I didn't have time to fix.

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4. DeSmuME Crash
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The following information is relevant only to DeSmuME; NO$GBA and hardware are fine.

DeSmuME crashes when you land on the central island group. This makes the game unfinishable, because you need to travel there once late in the game to advance the plot.

However, activating the following cheat will allow you to walk directly onto the Forbidden Gate on the central island and enter it directly without triggering a crash. From that point, you can activate Portal Edo yourself and use the Portal system to bypass the crash from then on.

Walkthrough Obstacles (Hold R)
1200a1ba 0000d100
94000130 feff0000
1200a1ba 0000e000
d0000000 00000000

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5. Credits
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Special thanks to my wife for tolerating many, many hours of this nonsense.

Thanks to Gemini for releasing the primary font for this project, Melissa, a lovely 2bpp font well-suited to the spirit of the game. I had to make a few tweaks as always to match the needs of the script, so please attribute any ugly bits and sloppy spacing to me.

NO$GBA and Crystal Tile 2 were critical tools for this project. Thanks are due to Martin Korth and angel-team for creating these.  Additionally, thanks to FAST6191 for translating Crystal Tile 2 into English along with cory1492, and for his help with forum questions.

Thanks to all fan translators, and thanks in particular to Absolute Zero Translations for releasing an English patch for Tales of the Tempest on April 1, 2013. I love April Fool's Day and even released the first buggy patch for Suikoden Card Stories on April 1, 2012. Seeing them flawlessly accomplish their goal helped inspire this patch idea, and seeing so many other wonderful fan translations out there gave me the determination to do my best.

Thanks to the existing English resources on this game, which were a great aid in playtesting and attempting to run down all possible lines.

Thanks to Archeia, who found a way around the DeSmuME crash using only existing cheat codes and allowed me to remove a workaround, which has given some people issues.

And, apologies to fan retranslators and Atlus USA!

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6. Version History
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1.01: Crisis Averted
Third release 4/13/2014. Eliminates the DeSmuME workaround.
     - The Portal Edo workaround was removed; abuse can make the game unfinishable.
     - Existing cheat codes are sufficient to reach the Forbidden Gate in DeSmuME.
     - If using DeSmuME, see Section 4, "DeSmuME Crash".

1.00: No Joke
Second release 4/6/2014. Game seems to be stable, and no major bugs have been reported.
     - The USA patch encounter rate has been bumped up to 50% of normal.
     - Map labels no longer misaligned but still kinda ugly.
     - A few botched translations fixed (notably some Empress of Grief quest items).

0.90: April Fool's!
Initial release 4/1/2014. Not tested as thoroughly as I would like, because it's a long game, but it's good enough to ship. I would treat this as an open beta; feel free to wait a week to see if any significant kinks remain.

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7. Tips and Tricks
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- A DeSmuME bug may occur when visiting the game's central island (and surrounding small isles), crashing the game. The player needs to visit this island once, and only once, to advance the plot. This patch adds a workaround - reactivating the first nine Portals in the overworld, and then stomping some Bloom, will automatically reactivate the tenth Portal as well. The player can travel through the tenth Portal and advance the plot without ever having to visit the central island. This is a small sequence break that skips a short cutscene.

- There are a few skills that make the game much easier to play - the Knight ability Walk Safe, the Samurai ability Evil Eye ("Demonic Countenance"), and some form of MANA regeneration (the Princess's Moonlit Song or the Healer's Craft Mana). A Knight/Samurai/Mage/Healer party is essentially easy mode.

- The "7th Dragon USA" patch reduces the encounter rate by 50% and damage from Bloom ("Furowaro") by 60%. While that's a huge decrease that neuters the resource management side of the game, it does leave battle difficulty intact while making variant parties more viable. (In other words, it's not much more of a cheat than having a Samurai and a Knight in your party.)

- Additionally, in either version, registering a character with the second Mage appearance and the name "*TLOVE", where * represents the musical note, activates a cheat. The new character comes equipped with items that prevent all random encounters and Bloom damage, which you can transfer to other characters as desired.

- There are 28 secret passwords that provide an extra SP, if you're willing to forgo a custom name. Each one is attached to one of the class appearances:

*TST01-04: Fighter
*TST05-08: Knight
*TST09-12: Rogue
*TST13-16: Samurai
*TST17-20: Mage
*TST21-24: Healer
*TST25-28: Princess

- The game contains text for a debug room, which has been sloppily translated, but is likely inaccessible without a programming change or hex cheat.

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8. Contact
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You can send questions or comments on the patch or anything else through the "Ask" function to my website cavespeak.org (which is just Tumblr "pokeytax"). I also have the Twitter account @pokeytax. If you have a more involved question or bug report, you can send it to 7thdragonpatch@gmail.com. I may not reply due to volume but I try to read everything.

To be honest, while I appreciate all feedback, thank-you notes tend to run together after a while. So feel free just to join in discussion of the game online. I'll probably find it at some point, and I appreciate both positive and critical comments.

If you are ecstatic about supporting fan translation, you can check out cavespeak.org/support, but please, buy a copy of the game and enjoy the patch guilt-free first!