DvD Translations presents:
Dragon Slayer Jr.
Romancia
Patch Released: April 23rd, 2008
Downloads
Patch Rev A
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ReadMe
History
23.April.2008
After a year and half, Dragon Slayer Jr. - Romancia is done! If you are ready for a challenge, try it out!
Our translation of Romancia features:
- a variable-width font
- a fully translated, edited, and polished script
- a translated title screen
- cleaned up/restored the graphics on the title screen
- enhancements to game play to make the game more playable/enjoyable including
- bug fixes to the original code
- script embellishment for better hints
- (optional) restoration of a previously unattainable item
- (optional) removal of the main situation that required you to have to restart the game
- extensive beta testing to weed out bugs
Although greatly improved from when it was first beta tested, figuring out what to do in the game is still the most difficult part.
In general the bosses are easy, but fighting the regular enemies can be annoying. The final boss, though, is unreasonably difficult; none of us have defeated it without extensive use of save-states.
Agent Baron was too busy with other projects to finish testing Romancia and so DvD forced...er, talked KlD into doing it. Final beta testing proved to be important; we found an issue dealing with using the previously unattainable item with bosses; the graphics could be messed up until you left the screen. It looks like Tokyo Shoseki had tried to deal with
this themselves but couldnt' fix it and so that might be why the item was removed.
It was easily fixed with the addition of a 10 byte routine which gets called when entering the boss rooms.
Screen Shots (Our Virtual Back of the U.S. Box)
Before and After Shots of the Title Screen and First Guy you Talk to
The MSX2 version of the title screen is shown on the left. Here you can see what a terrible job they did importing the screen. Yeah, I decided to make the characters crack a little smile. :-) They looked so sad before. :-(
Here is a shot of a set of stickers that Falcom released in a magizine. Notice Dragon Slayer in the upper right,
Xanadu in the center, Romancia sticker in the lower left, and Sorcerian below Dragon Slayer. Ys and Ys II
are also shown alsong with their turn based RPG Brandish, and their one attempt at a shooter, StarTrader.
Now go play Romancia and be sure to read the ReadMe first! Lots of good stuff in there as usual.
Happy birthday Mom!
17.February.2008
As far as I can tell Romancia is done. I feel that we've finally polished this turd enough so that some people will actually enjoy the game. Here's what we've done in the last 4 months:
- Unused code and an unattainable item were added back into the game.
- Every unused string was either added back in the place it was likely taken out or reused in a place where it was needed to enhance the game.
- Obvious programming mistakes by Tokyo Shoseki were corrected when found.
- Character names were added when they were named in the ending.
- Difficult areas to find or walk the correct direction at were changed to be something that made a lot more sense.
- harmony7 and DvD went through the script and improved the text to better match the game now that the appropriate context was known.
- KlD and DvD have Old Englishified (is that word?) the script, it was spell checked, and Radical R corrected the punctuation.
Giving a voice to the 3 non-talkitive old men in Azorba served as a way to bring back many of these features to the game, without changing what any of the existing people do. Plus, if you want to suffer through the game without these enchancements, players can choose NOT to talk to these people.
So, we have released what I'm hoping is the final version to Agent Baron, a mutual friend of Radical R and DvD. He has never played the game and so he will be doing the final beta testing on the game. He'll be video taping the entire process and releasing it on YouTube when we release the patch to the public, which, of course, I hope is sooner than later. At that time I will add screen shots here. In the mean time I still have to make a readme file. Whoopie.
16.October.2007
Well, now the TDP has been released, I was able to use it to take another look at Romancia again. It turns out the the missing text that I thought was used 5 times, was only actually used 3 times. The other two times were from unused code. There is other unused code too. I had already found some unused text. For example, there used to be 3 people who would buy things from you. The most exciting thing is the addition of an unused item. This item is FULLY FUNCTIONAL. It has a graphic and unused text to go with when you were supposed to be given this item. Additionally, there were some typos in the code that made it so things did not function like they were supposed to. These have been fixed when we have noticed them. For instance, there was one area in the game when you try to out the right door of a certain room that the original code required you to be pressing up instead of pressing right.
The original Romancia was a short game that had a 30 minute time. It HAD to be completed in less than 30 minutes. The fact that you couldn't do a battery save was actually a good thing because in all versions of Romancia, if you do the wrong thing you will be stuck and you have to start over anyway. If you saved before doing this, it would be very frustrating. The Famicom version was the last version made (until many years later where it was ported to the PC). Unlike the other versions, was not made by Falcom themselves. Tokyo Shoseki changed many things. They took out the 30 minute timer and in it's place they added a lot of locations to make the game longer. When they did this, they should have added a save feature. What would have made the game 10 times easier/more fun would have been a password save, such as that most popular of Dragon Slayer games in North America, Hudson's Faxanadu for the NES. Of course we now can use inifite savestates, but remember not always save to the same slot!
Because of the extreme dificulty of this game, (And when we say difficulty, it is knowing what to do that is hard. With a password save, the doing it part would not have been bad at all...) DvD Translation's is working hard to bring back as much of the good stuff that Tokyo Shoseki removed as possible and embelish the script, only when necessary, so as the player actually know what to do. To do his part, Radical R, has taken it upon himself to play the japanese MSX version of the game, and keep track of all the differences. Together, he and I will determine what we feel is necessary to be added to make this port of the game what it really should have been in the first place, and then I will attempt to add this functionality back into the game.
Even though we have put a ton of work into the this project already, fully translated the game, editied the script, and edited the compressed graphics of the title screen, I don't want to release it in it's current state. It's still too hard for the player to know what to do. Yet, I still feel that there's a decent action RPG hidden below all this. So, if you are waiting for the translation, please be patient, we want to make sure that you'll actually enjoy it when you bother to play it!
29.September.2007
Actually, a few weeks ago Radical R passed the game, and then, with his help, I did. It has a really nicely animated ending for an NES game. And the ending text used a completely different encoding scheme so we had never seen it. It names many of the chracters in the game in English and so now we know the proper way to spell their names.
Now, there are many pieces of text in the ROM that are never used by the code. But, after passing the game, there were still 2 pieces of text that I knew were used in the ROM, that all 3 of us still hadn't seen.
One of them was a hacking issue. It dealt with timing during a cut scene when you rescue the princess. The code was still erasing the text box when it tried to write new text. I had to change 1 byte to slightly delay when this text was shown, and now it works perfectly.
The second is a small piece of text that is used in at least 4 different places, yet we haven't ever seen it. In trying to figure out where it was used, I got interested in finishing Table Dumper Pro, to help me solve this Romancia issue, and so that is what I have been doing since then. Today, I will be using TDP, which is esentially ready for realease to help me with Romancia.
15.August.2007
We've fixed a few typos.
Radical R is having a wonderful time trying to pass the game... Actually, it's proving to be pretty darn hard.
In the mean time, here are scans of the box, cart, and guidebook... that Radical R wishes he had...
Famicom Box Front & Guidebook: 
Famicom Cart Front: 
Famicom Cart Back: 
August.2007
I played a lot of the game. Radical R is playing the game while on vacation.
25.July.2007
Yes, I finally did it. I finished my compressed graphics inserter and fixed up the title screen's graphics. Now it looks better that I thought it even could. I even added some glittering to the girl's crown's jewels. I realeased a new beta version to the guys today.
21.July.2007
Yeah! harmony7 finally got me a completed script on July 16. I just sent the Beta 1 version out to Radical R today. There are a few context things we need to see in the game to get the script perfect. Also, there are some cosmetic things things that I want to change on the lower half of the title screen, but it will take a lot of work and I might not do it since they are just tiny graphics issues that existed in the original version. We'll see...
2.May.2007
harmony7 gave me a 72% translated script this weekend. I wrote a script inserter Mon/Tue and wrote a compressed graphics title screen inserter on Wed. Today, Thur May 2, I messed with finishing the title screens sprites by hand, it took forever to get the last sprite right due reasons I won't go into. But it's all done now and all the changes look great. Needless to say, as soon as I get a 100% completed script, this project will be ready for beta testing. I played it for the first time today for an hour. I kinda like it so far...
20.April.2007
harmony7 has decided that he will work on translating it so I'm excited to see how it turns out. I'm editing the main title screen. I'll be writing the script inserter based on what ever format harmony7 presents the translated script to me in. I really want to see this project get released ASAP...
April.2007
In the middle of March, I accomplished my best hack so far for this game. It took a ton of work for me to get the timing right. I'm ready now for a translated script. Also, I finished modifying the first 2 title screens, but then I decided to work on Table Dumper Pro in the vein of writing a help file so people could actually use it.
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