Bahamut Lagoon - Translation Notes by Tomato
---------------------------------------------------


  I. About
  --------
  I'm including a bunch of comments and notes about my translation of the
  text in Bahamut Lagoon for various kinds of people, including: fellow
  game translators, people who are curious about how I translated BL,
  people who like to say good things/bad things about translations based
  on REAL facts (all too often I'll hear things like "Chrono Trigger
  translation sucks, a friend told me so" - which is utter nonsense).

  Be sure to check out my Bahamut Lagoon site at
  http://starmen.net/tomato/bahamut for any updates I may make to my
  translation notes (and other BL-related stuff).


  II. Quick Background
  --------------------
  I've translated about 12 or so other games, including big ones like
  Star Ocean and Live-A-Live (although I only did a portion of the latter).
  I've also translated manga, Japanese TV shows, short stories, and a novel.
  Oh yeah, if anybody in the game/game translating industry is reading this,
  I'm looking for a job, so contact me sometime.  Of course the likeliness
  of somebody from a real company actually playing this translation AND
  reading this text file is pretty slim, so I'll probably be selling Slurpees
  for the rest of my life.


  III. Quick Translation Overview
  -------------------------------
  My goal with Bahamut Lagoon was basically this: To translate stuff better
  than a lot of the bland commercial translations out there, but not as
  over-the-top as a lot of the fan translations turn out.  I wanted to be
  somewhere in the middle ground.  I don't take too many liberties with the
  text, but I do at least try to make people talk in their own unique ways.
  There are going to be lots of weird sounding parts (the intro to Chapter 15
  comes to mind instantly) but I think most people will really enjoy my
  translation decision.  At least that is my hope, anyway.


  IV. History
  -----------
  I won't go into the messy details and re-open old wounds, but I started
  translating BL's text at the end of May 2001.  I finished the initial
  translation a few weeks later, before I jumped onto the Star Ocean
  translation.  The project lay dormant for about 5 months after that as a
  bunch of stuff happened (mainly real life, Star Ocean, and other projects).
  Then, I took up script editing in late November and early December.

  I then took a 2 and a half month break to translate a book.  When I was
  done, I went back to finish BL editing.  Because of this long break, there
  were a bunch of inconsistencies in characters' style of speech.  I think
  I've ironed out most of these, but if you see anything that seems out of
  character, you now know the reason why.
  
  I finished script editing in March or April. Altogether, I'd say I easily
  put 150 hours, at the very least, into the translation and editing.

  Around this time, Dark Force (from DeJap) was kind enough to take Neill
  Corlett's place as the main ASM hacker.  He worked 8+ hours per day on it,
  for probably a little over 2 and a half months.  We all put in a lot of
  work to get the project to where it is today.  And now you are reading
  this.


  V. Character Personalities, Etc.
  --------------------------------
  This section is a little long and probably boring. But if you're wondering
  why some of the text sounds bland or stiff, that was done on purpose. Both
  Sendak and Taicho talk kind of weird, please refer to them in this list.
  This isn't even a complete list of the characters in the game.  Keeping
  track of everybody was hard.  Especially after that long break halfway
  through editing.

  * Byuu - Here's Byuu, the main character.  I don't think he has any
           dialogue of his own, save perhaps for choices you're allowed to
           make when responding to people.  I didn't really do much with that
           text though, other than making it sound normal.  I had to get each
           text choice on its own single line, so there were 1 or 2 times
           where I had to struggle to keep the text sounding the same as the
           original.  Just one of those technical issues game translators
           have to live with.
 
  * Yoyo - Here's Yoyo, the princess of Kahna, and the so-called "Dragnar".
           I actually have a lot to say about the title "Dragnar", but I'll
           talk about that later.  Anyway, one of the weak points of this
           game's story is definitely in Yoyo's character, at least in my
           opinion.  She's just plain stupid, and although that's not a
           problem in the plot, her dialogue and stuff was so stupidly
           written I wanna barf.  She's like this mega idiot blonde girl, she
           gets kidnapped and is scared of her powers.  I dunno, you'll just
           have to see for yourself how uncreative the writers were.

           Anyway, I didn't have to try too hard to bring across her
           ditziness.  She does talk like a girl though, so I tried to bring
           that forth - but if you ask specifically how that is done, I can't
           answer very well.  Not all girls talk similarly in English so I
           tried the best I could.

  * Palpaleos - Palpaleos is a general of the Empire, and Emperor Sauzer's
                best friend.  He plays a big part in the plot, but his
                dialogue isn't all that spectacular, and the way he talks
                isn't all that out of the ordinary, so I basically just tried
                to make his text sound natural.  Of course, everybody talks
                different depending on who they're talking to, who else is
                with them, etc., so when I say I tried to make it sound
                natural, I mean depending on each situation.

  * Sendak - Sendak's an old man (yes, he's a man for those who have doubts).
             He's kind of like an old advisor for the king and Yoyo.  Being
             an old man, he speaks in a definite old-man manner in the
             original Japanese.  It's hard to bring that across in English
             without using voices, so I tried to first draw out his sentences
             as much as possible, since old people do tend to ramble on a
             lot.  Luckily, this fits in with another quirk in his
             personality - that he rambles and complains a lot.  He also
             talks/thinks to himself a lot.  To help accentuate his
             rambliness I decided to not let him use many contractions in his
             speech. Whether or not this was a good idea I don't know, but I
             tried to be consistent at least.  I did let him use contractions
             when he was talking to himself though. He seemed very self
             concious and it just seemed fine to have him talk like that.

             And yeah, I don't know what's up with him, he does seem a little
             too attached to Byuu.  I'll leave any inferences to the player.
             Especially the... one scene.

  * Matelite - Matelite is the head of the knights of Kahna from what I can
               tell.  He's a big loudmouth and rude.  These kinds of
               personalities are always fun to try to translate, because it's
               at least possible in English translations. In contrast to
               Sendak and Taicho, I let Matelite use lots of contractions and
               quicker-sounding speech.  I'm sure most people won't notice it
               anyway, though. For the most part, the content of his dialogue
               makes up a big part of his personality, the way he says it is
               only the icing on the cake.  I like to think I did a reasonble
               job with him, though I'm sure some would want to disagree.

  * Bikkebakke - Bikkebakke, Rush, and Truce apparently were all just barely
                 surviving before Byuu let them into Kahna's dragon squad.
                 Because they're so similar in character and always hanging
                 around each other, I tried to keep the styles of all three
                 pretty close together.  And since they're kind of young and
                 not especially intelligent, I try to have them talk kind of
                 quick, and with lots of contractions and things like
                 "gonna".

                 Bikkebakke himself looks up to Byuu, almost as kind of an
                 older brother. He often refers to Byuu as "aniki" in the
                 Japanese version, but that shows familiarity more than
                 anything else, in this case (IMHO).  Because of this word,
                 some people who don't know a whole lot of Japanese think
                 Bikkebakke is Byuu's little brother, but this is not true.
                 Watch out for people who pretend to know Japanese.

  * Rush - Rush hangs around Bikkebakke and Truce a lot.  He's really
           headstrong, and doesn't like to think too much.  Hence the name, I
           suppose.  Anyway, he reminds me of a hyperactive kid in his late
           teens, so I tried to make him come across as such.  Hope it
           worked.

  * Truce - Truce.  It took a lot of time to pin down a good transliteration
            of his katakana name, but I think this is most likely what it
            should be. I've seen people call him Tulus or Toulouse or Taurus,
            but I don't think any of them are quite right.

            Truce seems to be the less hyper of the three, to me at least.  I
            hope this comes across.  I'm worried a lot about inconsistencies
            in his language that might creep in. In old, old versions of the
            script he talked a little too stiff.  If this is still anywhere
            in the script, it'd be in the first few chapters. Hopefully I
            eliminated these inconsistencies.

  * Taicho - Taicho is/was the captain of the army of Mahal.  Unfortunately
             the Empire kicked the crap out of them and now Taicho is out of
             a job, home, and wife.

             Taicho's dialog style was difficult to decide on.  In the end, I
             decided that since he's a captain, and since he ends everything
             with "de arimasu", that I should make him sound like a
             stiff-talking army guy.  So his text will sound really stiff.
             I'm betting that people who don't realize this purposely-made
             decision of mine will chalk up his stiff-sounding text to a bad
             translation/translator and/or bad editing, but they don't know
             the truth.

             At any rate, I'm concerned the most about Taicho's dialog,
             because there were some major inconsistencies in his text in
             early chapters in early versions of the script.  If he suddenly
             starts talking normal, let me know, because he's not supposed to
             sound normal.

             One of the main things that is lost in translation if his text
             is his "de arimasu". It's kind of like his signature "word", but
             in translation that word is lost.  Normally that might not be so
             important, but there are a few times when people are making fun
             of him, or when he's talking and the game doesn't tell you he's
             talking, you can just tell it's him from the "de arimasu".  But
             in translation that's gone, so it makes things harder. I've
             tried my best to keep things working, but this is just one of
             the problems any translator will have to face.  I could always
             go the Pokemon route and have him say "Taicho Taicho!!" at the
             end of every sentence, but then I would have a mob and the
             flaming torches and the biting and the kicking...  And the
             Mini-Devils already talk like that.

  * Gunso -  Gunso is a heavy-armor knight under Taicho.  He apparently has
             some weird scratching problem - I'll leave any possible reasons
             up to the player.  I tried to keep his dialogue between normal
             and Taicho-level stiffness.  It varies but not by a whole lot.

  * Barclay - Barclay is another heavy-armor knight under Taicho's command.
              His text is a little less stiff than Taicho, because of little
              side-story stuff that happens later in the game.

  * Anastasia - Didn't do a whole lot with her character, as she has VERY few
                lines in the game.  I just made her sound normal.

  * Diana - Same as Anastasia, I didn't do a whole lot with Diana's text.

  * Ectarina - Ectarina seems like a shy girl, and very unstable.  So I tried
               to bring that forth.

  * Frederica - She seems to be way too hooked on medicine. I tried to at
                least make her sound like it, although in reality I didn't
                have to do much.

  * Joy - Um, there's not a whole lot to say about her.  She serves the queen
          of Campbell, so when she DOES talk I try to make her sound elegant
          and/or official, but she doesn't talk a whole lot.

  * Melodia - Melodia is a little girl.  It's pretty easy to make people
              sound like little kids, because we have little-kid talk in
              English too.She hangs around the Mini-Devils a lot, and in a
              way she even looks kind of like them (not so much in battle
              though). I think I did okay with her text, though there might
              be a few places where I could have made her sound more kid-like
              than I did.

  * Nelbo - Just like Joy, Nelbo serves the queen of Campbell, and as such I
            tried to make her fit that character in her dialogue.  Of which
            there is VERY little of.

            Anyway, Nelbo = :) IMO

  * Zora - Zora's an older woman, and I guess she serves Princess Yoyo. She
           isn't all that graceful or anything, and she's pretty rough.  She
           yells at people a lot, not to mention occasional physical
           violence.  I tried to bring this coarseness out. She's a mother of
           one of the other characters, so I tried to make her sound like a
           strict, middle-aged mother.

  * Lukia - Lukia is a light armor knight.  She's kind of playful in a
            kissy-kissy sort of way. I think you know what I mean. Anyway she
            also seems like a big loudmouth to me so I tried to put that into
            her dialogue.

  * Jeanne - I don't know a whole lot about Jeanne, but people mention she's
             sort of tomboyish in the game, so I tried to make her sound like
             that.

  * Mist - She's constantly bragging about her good looks and talking to
           herself about how beautiful she is.  I didn't do too much with
           her.  She's also a secret character, for those who are paying
           attention.

  * Reeve - Reeve is a Lancer. Together with his friend Frenze, he does a
            lot of showing off of his lancing skills.  I had a hard time
            figuring out what to name him and Frenze, but these seemed the
            best.

  * Frenze - Frenze's name was hard to figure out too.  In the end I'm glad I
             chose this one, it's short and isn't too funky.  Character-wise,
             he's just like Reeve, so there's not much to say.

  * Donfan - Donfan was my favorite character to work on.  Translating his
             text was hell, but making it sound good was real fun. I'm sure
             most people will agree a lot of his scenes throw in a lot of
             much-needed humor to break up the over-dramatic monotony of the
             story.  Maybe it'll make some people laugh out loud even.  I'd
             be real happy if it did.

             Anyway, the first thing I should point out that his name in
             Japanese can be seen as a rendition of "Don Juan".  He certainly
             fits the character, sort of.  The reason I chose Donfan was
             two-fold: that was what I called him from the start, and
             changing his name later on would suck, and the name "Don Juan"
             doesn't fit too well in this game, in English, IMO.  Of course,
             calling him Donfan isn't exactly wrong either, it's a perfectly
             allowable rendition of his katakana name.  In the end it's just
             a choice the translator will have to make, and I chose Donfan.
             I think most people will like this one better. And if not, they
             should stick bananas in their ears.

             I tried to make his speech really wild and corny.  I hope people
             appreciate his text style.  My only concerns are that maybe
             early in the game his style will be slightly inconsistent with
             his style later in the game. I'll hopefully have had that fixed
             up by the final patch.

             Also there's his trademark line, it's a bugger to translate.
             Ah well.  I'm pretty sure my translation of "such is the way of
             the world" is WRONG.  I'm fairly certain "that's what I'm here
             for" or "that's my job" is closer.  But I think I'll keep it as
             is until I can take a break and look at it again with clearer
             eyes. If that makes sense at all.

  * Zora's Son - Zora's Son doesn't give his name (right away), probably
                 because having Zora for his mother really screwed him up in
                 the head.  Character-wise, he seems like a kind of innocent
                 guy who had the unfortunate luck of having a real monster of
                 a woman for a mother.  So he's kind of timid, and I tried to
                 put that into his text.

  * Manyo - Manyo is one of the Mini-Devils.  There's not a whole lot to say
            except these guys are weird.  I think they're really into death
            and praying to gods of death and stuff.  Actually you don't know
            about that until maybe midway of the game.  When I got to that
            text I was like, "WTF."  Anyway, my only decision was how to make
            the text in parentheses sound - should I make it sound weird,
            like caveman talk, or just normal, like normal subtitles? In the
            end I chose to do a little of both.

  * Monyo - See above. Nothing special here.

  * Munyo - See above again.  Bleh.

  * Wagahai - Wagahai's a Mini-Devil who thinks he/she is better than the
              others.  I'm not quite sure about a couple lines this
              Mini-Devil says inside the ship (you'll see what I mean, I need
              to analyze those lines more), but this Mini-Devil is definitely
              proud.  So the other Mini-Devils eventually get fed up with it,
              and then.... you'll just have to play ;)

  * Sajin - Sajin is a ninja-for-hire.  He doesn't say a whole lot, so I
            didn't put a whole lot of effort into making him his own style.

  * Zeroshin - Zeroshin is another ninja-for-hire.  He's extremely shy, and
               always writing letters back to his mother.  I didn't need to
               do much with his text, the content of his text speaks for
               itself most of the time.


  VI. Naming
  ----------
  People like to think that translating non-dialogue stuff is real easy.
  Like translating item names, monster names, etc. They're actually MUCH
  harder than dialogue. It just seems easier to beginners because they're
  single words. But a lot of items, spells, monsters, and the like are
  made-up names, or names based slighly off a real word, but aren't real
  words themselves.  Or, names which are originally neither Japanese nor
  English. BL had a lot of these words. There was a bit of German influence
  on this game.  A lot of items and enemies were based off of World War I and
  II terminology.  Others were of historical and religious significance,
  which I also had to research.

  A lot of work went into figuring out these item names. But there were a
  few lost causes. In these cases, I tried to come up with a good equivalent
  that would make sense to English speakers.  So if anybody wants to complain
  about how I named things, you can't say I didn't put a lot of work into it.
  But I make mistakes too, so if I did make any, please let me know.

  Somebody once came up to me and said that all the character names in BL
  were supposed to represent who they are. For example, Rush.  His name
  sort of signifies who he is. Also, there's Taicho, which literally is a
  sort of military commander, and Gunso, which is literally a sergeant.
  So this person also pointed out that the main character should be called
  "View" not "Byuu", since he gets to "view" all that happens in the game.
  I don't buy this.  What about Sendak? Matelite? Palpaleos? Just doesn't
  work. But I thought I'd throw this in for people to ponder over.

  Some of the chapter titles are kind of corny/weird, but I'm not going to
  change them just because they sound weird.  The one I have the most problem
  with is "Full of Regret". I should probably have translated it some other
  way, because "regret" doesn't seem to be the right word in this context.
  The title comes from a line Matelite says in the chapter, but again, regret
  doesn't seem to be quite the right word. But it still makes sense overall.

  Many of the default dragon names are slightly different. Byuu's dragon is
  Salamander in the original, but that doesn't fit in 8 characters, so we
  dropped it down to Salmando.  Icedrake was originally Icedragon.  Thundera
  or whatever we called it was originally Thunder Hawk. What we have as
  Molten would probably sound best as Morten, IMO, but that was one of the
  things I conceded to DF. His reason for calling it Molten was because it
  would be the fourth element earth since the other 3 fire/thunder/water were
  used on the other dragons. The flagship's name was originally Fahrenheit,
  but we had to make it fit within 8 characters, so now it's Farnheit. You
  can always change these names to whatever you like; you get to name your
  dragons and your ship near the beginning of the game.

  In regard to "Dragnar", let me say this. From the katakana, Dragnar is the
  most likely English spelling. I used it in all my early scripts. I didn't
  like it very much, so I changed it to "Dragoner" in an edited script,
  mainly because other groups were calling it different things, and because
  people on message boards were calling it by that too. But after a while,
  I changed my mind again, and put it back to Dragnar.  I'd rather choose a
  name because of what the game says and what I think than because of outside
  influences. So now it's "Dragnar" again. Plus, it has that sort of exotic
  feel that the original Japanese word has. Dragoner just doesn't sound all
  that exotic.

  Some item names were practically impossible to translate. The biggest
  culprit is "Drawer Thing", which is the closest rendition I think anybody
  can really make. It's a "thing" in a "you-know-what" type of sense, at
  least that's the original's meaning. "an item from a drawer - you know
  what it is."  Another is Uniuji - I don't think this is "Sea Urchin Grub"
  but just another made up name. "Uni" shows up a lot in this game, so I
  think Uniuji is just another extension of that.


  VII. Editing
  ------------
  I did all of the dialogue editing myself. So if it sucks, blame me. Dark
  Force helped to do some of the in-battle text, map dialogue, and other
  little things. I didn't always agree 100% with his decisions, but I'm still
  very happy with how things turned out.

  Editing took me probably 2 months total. I wrote a custom text previewer
  application (which was pretty sucky), and went through every single line
  of text to make sure the text was formatted correctly. If it wasn't
  formatted correctly, the game would crash and it wouldn't work. There's a
  slight chance there may be a line or two in the game that will overflow
  the box and freeze up the game, but if there are any of those lines, I must
  have missed them in my testing.

  Since the game is so linear, I went through each chapter and edited the
  text as I played. I would edit a chapter's text, insert it into the game,
  try it out, then re-edit and reformat to sound better.  I would then test
  this newer text and re-edit it again. I did this time after time after time,
  for each and every chapter. I played the game so much it was disgusting.


  VIII. Miscellaneous
  -------------------
  To answer one of the most-likely questions: Yes, the game is that perverted
  in the original version.  I made sure not to go overboard, but I made sure
  not to be too cautious.

  Speaking of cautious, one of the big changes I was *going* to make was with
  the word "drug" that appears all throughout the game. In English, the first
  thing that word brings out is "illegal narcotic", which is not exactly how
  it is in Japanese. Because of this cultural difference, I was going to
  change all the instances of "drug" to different things like "Tonic", "Heal",
  etc. so that they would make sense in context. I can just see the little,
  immature teenagers making bad jokes and giggling about items like
  "High Drug" or "White Drug" or "Drug Hit" or "Heal Grass" or whatever else
  there is. In the end, though, I just decided, screw that, I'm not gonna
  change it, people would just call the translation sucky if I changed it,
  and it'd just take more time which I can spend sleeping.

  Originally the font was the same one as in Neill's SD3 translation, but
  since this game looks so much like FF6, I wanted to go with FF3us's font.
  I had to slightly modify a few of the larger characters, like w and m,
  but in the end it looks real slick. Very professional looking.

  For those people who like to play games a zillion times and find all the
  smallest secrets, check out the checklist at my BL page. It lists
  some hard-to-find stuff, some of which is stuff we added and/or slightly
  changed (changed is such a harsh word).

  As for "Holy Dragons", this was a difficult decision. Certainly, these
  dragons are not of a holy nature. Dragon Gods was another possibility, but
  it just didn't seem quite right to me. Divine Dragons was another choice,
  but that sounds pretty funky, to me at least. It was a hard decision but I
  chose Holy Dragons in the end, because I had to choose *something*.


  IX. End
  -------
  That's all for my little BL translation notes file.  I'm sure I'll think of
  stuff to add to it later, so if you're one of the weird geeks who has read
  this far, and you happen to be interested in this kind of stuff, check out
  my BL page at http://starmen.net/tomato/bahamut. If I ever want to update
  the translation notes, I'll do it there.  I also have a complete
  walkthrough with screenshots, helpful tips, and explanations on how to get
  secret stuff at that site, not to mention lots of pics, downloads, and
  other stuff. So check it out sometime.


  X. Personal Thanks
  ------------------
  Too many people to thank. Neill Corlett (http://lfx.org/~corlett), Dark
  Force, all my Japanese sensei and friends in Japan who helped me out with
  learning the language. reidman, and all the cool people at Starmen.Net. All
  the cool people over at MO's translation board, koitsu for pulling off that
  awesome April Fool's joke (you had me tricked for about 0.5 seconds, it was
  the lawyer name that gave it away big time), the people at the BL GameFaqs
  board who helped me with some info when I needed it, the authors of some
  Japanese BL pages which don't exist any longer, Summon Illusion, Zalagren,
  iMoose, and Square (for the cool game, and for hopefully hiring me. Right???
  Come on. ;)

  NO thanks to all the "gimme BL now", "WHAT UP WITH BAHUMAT" kiddies who
  have pestered me for an entire year. "If you're translating BL why aren't
  you letting people download it? you're a stupid liar" My answer to that is:
  I wasn't letting people download it because it wasn't done yet. Idiots.

  Now go play the game and stop reading my boring crap.

                                     -Tomato (http://starmen.net/tomato)
                                     May 31, 2002


=============================================================================
=============================================================================


Bahamut Lagoon - Technical Notes by Dark Force
----------------------------------------------

  Reprogramming
  -------------
  Originally, I only wanted to help out Neill finish his work on BL, I did
  not plan on taking over the entire project. It quickly became clear that
  Neill had no interest in finishing BL on his own or even with help, and so
  my interest in BL diminished as well. It was only when Tomato consistently
  began to persuade me to work on it and when the other groups began
  announcing their BL projects, that I decided to actually help.

  Initially, I was impressed by the work Neill had done with the 13x13 and
  8x8 variable width fonts and the dialogue script, thinking those would make
  my job really easy. Neill had done 3 of the 12x12 variable width fonts and
  one of the 8x8 variable width fonts, as well as the dialogue replacement
  and recompression. I never would have imagined how much was left to be done.
  Neill didn't know it at the time and neither did I, but he had only
  scratched the surface. And to make things worse, Tomato wanted EVERYTHING
  in a variable width font! So, reluctantly, I complied. It was a challenge
  to find enough VRAM space to hold all of the vwf text, like hacking the
  inventory screen, for example.

  Seeing the finished product, however, I think it was worth it. The game
  feels more like a psx game than an snes game, as I don't remember any other
  snes game or translation having a dynamic variable width 8x8 font (except
  for Front Mission which used one, I don't know if it used it everywhere or
  not). It was so nice not having to abbreviate item names and not truncating
  text, forcing it to sound bad. It makes the whole translation that much
  more friendly and enjoyable.

  Eventually I think this will affect future translations to do full 8x8 vwf
  hacks (which are much harder than 16x16 vwf hacks). I know Bongo is already
  implementing one for his current project and I'm thinking of doing one for
  Star Ocean. Kammedo's BL patch also uses a variable width 8x8 font, but
  that was only after Neill tried adding one first.

  This game is by far one of the ugliest I've worked on, especially when
  adding an 8x8 vwf. There are so many inconsistencies, hundreds of hardcoded
  pointers, dialogue scripts embedded in 2 separate scripting languages,
  individual text strings spread out all over the damn rom, every different
  kind of pointer system possible, at least 5 different fonts and routines to
  display them, which all look the same on screen! Some of the fonts were
  identical when decompressed, yet were compressed with different routines. I
  often became quite sick of all the inconsistencies and stupidities in this
  game and can only imagine it was written by 5 separate teams who never
  spoke to each other and kept adding more features as hacks rather than
  including them into the game engine.

  After it's all said and done, I can take pride in the work we did on this
  game. As far as the hacking goes I think it's the best looking job I've
  done to date, and Neill gets half the credit for that. Also, Tomato's 12x12
  font makes the dialogue very easy to read. It's similar to my ToP font but
  his looks much better.


  Visualization
  -------------
  As with with other translations, I spent a lot of effort on redesigning the
  various screens and repositioning text and cursors to make the most
  effective use of space while still keeping the screens pretty and easy to
  read. The tech names were a bit too long in some places which cause some
  cramming, and one screen where there is a problem with space is the
  formation sub-screen, but overall they look great. I could have made more
  room by expanding the window borders right to the edges of the screen, but
  then the screen would appear cut off if the game was played on a TV screen
  instead of an emulator, and I intend to play it on my TV.

  I took some liberties along the way, improving some screens where I thought
  the original game needed improvement. Below is a list of modifications that
  changed the game from it's original design:

  - Added variable width fonts everywhere
    * This will cause noticible slow down on some screens (such as item lists)
      compared to the Japanese version and you can even see it redrawing in
      some situations. For this reason, there is a separate patch for
      emulators which will reduce all the slowness. The emulator patch,
      however, will not work properly on a copier.

  - Inventory Menu Screen
    * I moved the 2 item columns as close together as I could to fit the
      longest item name. The right column is actually a bit wider than the
      left column, but it's almost impossible to notice unless you have the
      same item name on both columns, which is also impossible.
    * The original text at the bottom read "Dragon Keeper's Item Explanation",
      which sounded bad and was too long to fit with the vwf so I changed it
      to "Inventory / Item Details" because that sounds closer to what you can view
      and there are two separate screens accessible from that one menu option.
    * I made the regular item icons variable width, meaning you may notice
      that first letter of light armor items and heavy armor items do not
      line up.
    * For the item details I used up and down arrows to show status changes.

  - Dragons Menu Screen
    * I changed the dragon status attributes (at the botton of the screen)
      from font text to colorized icons drawn by CPF, which I think work much
      better especially given the limited room on that screen.

  - Formation Sub-Menu Screen
    * I moved around some text to make more room for tech lists, so a couple
      long item names (weapons/armor) overflow on to the next line. I don't
      care enough to fix it and it's only on a small number of items so
      chances are you won't notice it, plus there's no more room to move it
      around anyways.

  - All Menu Status Screens
    * I chose not to use the variable width font for HP/MP/SP/LV/NEXT/EXP
      because I felt they were more important and I wanted them to stick out.
    * I also chose not to use the vwf for PARTY and PAGE for the same reason.
    * I chose to leave TIME as fixed width because it's always directly followed
      by numbers which are also fixed width. It would look strange to mix the
      two font types together here.

  - Item Descriptions on Menu Screens
    * There is no shadow on the 12x12 variable width font used for descriptions.
      Neill did this one and he didn't included a shadow, reason being it's
      really nasty since the font is displayed using sprites. I don't blame
      him and it doesn't bother me enough to try and add a shadow to it.

  - All Money Screens
    * I chose to use PR instead of Piro (the game's currency) because it's
      more in line with using GP like Square does in its English translations.

  - Naming Screen
    * I completely redesigned this, instead of trying to reuse the Japanese
      layout. The result is it looks like a naming screen should be, instead
      of a hacked up Japanese one. The name cursor is also repositioned on a
      pixel basis, to accomodate the variable width font for the name.

  - Load/Save Game Screen
    * I expanded the 12x12 chapter names to print on two lines instead of one,
      because I didn't want to truncate any of Tomato's translations. There's
      one small bug as a result but I don't care since this screen looks
      amazing the way it is now.

  - Title Screen
    * I fixed the "Temporally Play" graphic to read "Temporary Play",
      silly Square...
    * I Added our custom logos beside the Square logo.

  - Sound Menu Screen
    * Neill added a hidden jukebox (sound test) to the game. The names used
      in the track titles of the songs don't correspond to the spelling
      Tomato used in the dialogue, this is because the track titles were taken
      from an OST cd (I think) but weren't necessarily correct, but we will
      still honor them. For example, they had Zauzer instead of Sauzer.

  - Dragon Feeding Screen
    * I changed how the dragon class was displayed slightly, by adding a cell
      separator instead of appending it with a slash.
    * I made the Loyalty/Fidelity statuses always visible, which the game
      originally hid unless you had an Uni Uni dragon; I think they're useful
      to see at all times.
    * I also changed the graphics/text for Loyalty/Fidelity from '?' and '??'
      to letters of the status they actually represent.

  - Dragon Transformation
    * When the dragon transforms, I went as far as making it display 'a' or
      'an' when it says "Transformed into a[n] xxx dragon.", instead of taking
      the cheap way out and saying "Became xxx dragon".

  - In-Battle Screens
    * I added pixel-centering for the magic/attack names and descriptions.
    * For the battle dialogue I forced it to be not centered (unlike the
      original game) because I felt centered dialogue didn't look right.
    * I also allowed the battle dialogue to have multiple lines of text,
      instead of just one line in the original.
    * I made the colorized item icons display instead of the standard vwf
      icons. This isn't really a change from the original, but I'm listing it
      so that people don't think it's a bug on our part: there is an icon that
      looks like a bomb in battle which is appears as a pot on the status
      screens. That's what the original game did so I'm keeping it the same
      way.
    * The character select window I shortened because it was longer than it
      needed to be now that we were using a variable width font for the names.
    * I removed the ":" after the element/status icons for enemies because it
      seemed completely useless to me.
    * For when a spell or item fails, I replaced the "Fail" word in Japanese
      with a "Fail!" graphic in English, but I don't know if that's the best
      word to use.. maybe "Miss!" or "Missed!" ?

  - After-Battle Screens
    * I changed the colors of "Exp" and "Lv Up!". The game originally meant
      to display Exp in a different color, but because of a palette bug on
      their part, it showed up as white. When I fixed that and "Exp" showed
      up in yellow, "Lv Up!" looked strange also in yellow, so I changed it
      to the next available color which was orange.
    * I removed the "+" sign from the amount of exp gained after battle.

  - Main Dialogue
    * There are a few strings that contain hidden references to ourselves,
      one of them tells you how to access the jukebox.

  - Map/Field Dialogue
    * The scenario objective is now pixel-centered.
    * When drowning, it displays the message "Will drown in x turn[s].", I
      made the "s" in "turns" only display if there is more than 1 turn left,
      instead of taking the cheap way out and saying "turn(s)".
    * The only string we didn't find was "Dragon evolved into xxx", when a
      dragon evolves on the field. If anyone gets this to happen, please send
      us a savestate, you will probably see garbage text on the screen.

  - Map/Field Menus
    * For spell details, I drew range and radius icons instead of using text.
    * For the terrain window, I replaced the 12x12 font with an 8x8 variable
      width font and pixel-centered the terrain type (Tomato's idea).
    * For the main menus, I used different idents/cursor positions depending
      if the field menu or attack menu or dragon menu is being displayed,
      in an effort to make the text in the menu look centered. It works most
      of the time but not always.

  - Intro/End Credits
    * Fixed Square's spelling mistakes ("designner") and added us to the
      credits.


  Editing
  -------
  Like Tomato said, I helped with the editing for map and battle dialogue, so
  don't complain to him if the text isn't exactly what was said in Japanese.
  I wanted to make the text sound more elaborate rather than using the lame
  incomplete phrases that existed in Japanese. For example, 
  original text: "Lestat: I haven't started yet!",
  my edit: "Lestat: I still have a full deck up my sleeve!" (talking about
  showing his potential in battle); or, 
  original text: "Sauzer: The Holy Dragons' power... It is a terrifying power!",
  my edit: "Sauzer: The power of the Holy Dragons commands such malevolence..."
  That's not exactly what you'd call literal translations. I know Tomato wanted
  to keep to the original scripts while still trying to make them sound good,
  but in this case I didn't think that would work, and I wanted to have some fun
  with those scripts as well. The only reason I chose to edit them was because
  I was sick of hacking at this point.


  Retranslations
  --------------
  Anyone who wants to translate BL to their own language, DO NOT CONTACT US AND
  DO NOT RIP OFF OUR PATCH! We will plan on working on multilingual BL
  translations when we're ready. In the mean time, Kammedo is probably more able
  to help with translating BL to other languages, I think he's already planning
  one for German. There is also a group that already has a BL patch in French
  that could also help you with another language translation. There's also a
  Thai translation group that has made a decent BL patch.

                                       -Dark Force (http://www.dejap.com)
                                       May 31, 2002


  What's New
  ----------

  VERSION 1.3:

  * Fixed all the crashing that happened. This was because of a simple
    missing % sign in the main script. The game now runs fine. We've re-tested
    the entire game and no crashes were to be found. If the game crashes,
    then you likely have a bad ROM.

  * Fixed a few aesthetical things in the script.

  * Fixed that fireworks graphical glitch for good.


  VERSION 1.2:

  * The checksum has been fixed. So if you apply this patch and your emulator
    says the checksum is bad, it means your original ROM was corrupt. Look
    elsewhere for the ROM. WE WILL NOT SEND ONE TO YOU OR TELL YOU WHERE TO
    GET ONE. If, after you apply the patch, the checksum is OK, then you have
    a good version of the ROM.

  * Fixed instances in the script that might have frozen the game if you
    renamed a main character to a long name. This will fix the problems that
    a few people had in Chapters 6, 12, and 15.

  * Also fixed some spelling and text consistency issues. Fixed a few item
    and dragon class names, as well.

  * Re-edited a bit of the map dialogue text and other map messages.

  * Fixed the dragon evolution line on the map scene. Thanks to all who
    provided us with save states.


  Known Issues
  ------------
  * Zsnes 1.337 WIN has a bug during battle where the message window appears
    in the middle of the screen after an attack fails. THIS IS NOT OUR
    PROBLEM! This will be remedied in future versions of ZSNES.
  
  * Load/save game screen: garbage text appears at bottom of screen momentarily
    when saving a game.

  * Long item names on formation sub-screen overflow onto the next line.

  * There is a version of the ROM out there that gets your party members to
    Level 99 instantly. This is a bad ROM. THIS IS NOT OUR PROBLEM! There are
    also versions of the ROM that are corrupt and will cause the game to
    reset randomly or just mess up in weird ways.

  * If you use cheat codes, the game may suddenly reset on you at anytime.
    Use cheat codes at your own risk.

  ! If anyone notices any other bugs, please report them to us.


  Bug when using the patch on a COPIER ONLY
  -----------------------------------------

  When viewing the list of items in battle or during dragon feeding, the item
  names may show garbage text. To get around this problem, select any item in
  the list as if you were about to use it, then press the B button to cancel
  and return to the item list. When you return to the list, the item names
  will be properly displayed.


  Patching Help
  -------------
  For the first time, we are not providing any support for using this patch.
  We didn't spend all these months translating this game only to be barraged
  by questions on how to apply the patch. If you haven't figured it out by
  now, the DeJap forum is the place to ask these questions. Click on the
  Forum icon at the top of the DeJap homepage (the link has been fixed), but
  for lazy people, the URL is http://board.zsnes.com/index.php?board=6 .
  Make sure to read the topics at the very top of the board; the answers you
  need will most likely be there already.


  Credits
  -------

  All Translations...........:  Tomato
  All Programming/Hacking....:  Neill, Dark Force
  12x12 VWF Font.............:  Tomato
  8x8 VWF Font...............:  Neill
  16x16 Status Icons.........:  CPF
  8x8 Naming Font............:  CPF
  All Main Dialogue Editing..:  Tomato
  Non Main Dialogue Editing..:  Tomato, Dark Force
  Testing....................:  Tomato, Dark Force, Neill

  Special Thanks to (for technical assistance):
  Neill, Bongo, Kammedo, F.H

  Special Thanks to (for other):
  iMoose, zalagren, Summon Illusion, MO, Shih Tzu, Major Damage, animesou,
  didalos, katharsis
