------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart English translation Copyright 2008 Released on March 16, 2008 The Translation Team http://kaioshin.romhacking.net ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Project Overview 2. Instructions 3. Project History 4. Instructions 5. About the Game 6. Translation Reflections 7. F.A.Q. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Project Overview Project Lead: KaioShin Hacking: KaioShin Kingcom Translation: Tom Special Thanks to: Djinn Martin Korth Beta Testing staff: Neil, Crysta, Pennywise, Aerdan, Simpleton, I.S.T., Djinn Thanks to: D, FlashPV, Gemini, labmaster, Nightcrawler, psxAuthor , Ryusui, ReBirFh, sunwukong The #ROMHacking.net channel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Introduction After almost 2 years of labor, many ups and downs, and more than a good dose of stress and frustration, I'm proud to finally present a complete, English translation for Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart. It has been hard work, but it was also a work of dedication and love. The whole staff that worked on this project invested hundreds of hours upon hours into this game. We are proud of our work and believe that we delivered a quality translation that doesn't need to hide behind commercial translations. We hope you'll enjoy this excellent game as much as we did. Have fun! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. Project History (Timeline) March 2006 - Project started May 2006 - Script dumped June 2006 - Tom joins the project - Translation starts July 2006 - Script translation completed October 2006 - New website January 2007 - VWF code working December 2007 - Kingcom joins the project - Formatting completed - Script inserted January 2008 - Menu hacking completed - Beta testing started March 2008 - Project completion ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. Instructions The translation is being distributed as an IPS patch. You can apply it to a clean ROM image of the game with an IPS patcher like Lunar IPS. If you're going to play this translation on an emulator, we recommend no$GBA. It's the most accurate GBA emulator and tested to work with the translation perfectly. You will need a working GBA BIOS image for no$GBA. VBA version 1.8.0beta or newer should run the game as well, but it's not tested. Earlier versions will have timing problems that might result in glitches during the game (for example a flickering world map). The game has been tested on real GBA hardware too and runs fine. Depending on your flashcart you might run into flickering on the world map though. At the time of release we haven't investigated the issue too closely yet, but it appears to be related to the flash card's speed. The translation has been tested and confirmed to work flawlessly with an EZ-Flash V 3in1 Expansion Pack. DO NOT ask us where to get the ROM or a BIOS image. You will be ignored and/or banned from our sites. Obtaining a ROM image without owning the original Japanese cartridge is illegal. If you pirate the game to use with our translation, the translation team can't be hold responsible for your actions. DO NOT distribute a pre-patched ROM image. DO NOT distribute our patch without this release note file. We worked 2 years on this project, and demand at least this much respect for our work. DO NOT use our work as a base for any other works (especially new translations) without the translation team's consent. You can contact us through the project website and request permission and we'll gladly give it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5. About the Game Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart is the third installment in the well known Dragon Quest Monsters series. At the time of this translation's release, it's the only game in the Monsters series that didn't get an official English localization. Caravan Heart was the very last game published by Enix themselves, right before they merged with Squaresoft. It's assumed that the game never saw an English release due to the company's restructuring at that time. Announced in 2002 simultaneously with Dragon Quest VIII, it acts as a sort of prequel to Dragon Quest VII. The game follows Prince Kiefer on a grand adventure in which he becomes the leader of a caravan. Unlike the previous Dragon Quest Monsters games, the game isn't entirely focused on monsters alone. The caravan is also filled with several human party members, which will aid you in your quest. There are 22 different character classes, with completely different abilities. Together with your guard monsters, the game offers for a practically endless variety of possible strategies and formations. The monster breeding of the previous game was reworked into monster reformations this time. Instead of breeding new monsters you collect hearts of defeated monsters and combine them to reform your monsters into new forms. The system offers a great deal of freedom for experimentation and collecting. With nice graphics and a classical Dragon Quest soundtrack the game offers everything a Dragon Quest fan could wish for. Caravan Heart has a lengthy main quest that will keep you busy for at least 30-40 hours. After that you'll be treated to a whole new quest in which you can easily spend over 200 hours and more. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6. Translation Reflections I had played and beaten Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart long before I encountered Kaioshin's website. When I did, I knew that I had to lend a hand. Translating an RPG is a huge task, especially one as big as Dragon Quest. There seemed to be a lot of misunderstandings about this game. Most gamers didn't even seem to know that the title of the game was Caravan -Heart-, not "Caravan Hearts!" (It's a personal pet-peeve of mine!) When I offered my help to Kaioshin, I did it under the condition of anonymity. Still, I'm just an ordinary fan; I'm not involved with the industry or anything. (Sorry, conspiracy theorists!) My name's Tom. I've done other translation work under pseudonyms before, but there's no use in hiding under nicknames, really. To be perfectly honest, I didn't want to get involved with the "community" side of translating. I didn't want to have to answer to anybody, because any translation is bound to rub people the wrong way. I really don't like the bickering and nitpicking that goes on in the messageboards. I just wanted to get this game running in English. Doing this proved to be quite a difficult task. You may not realize how much text is in this game while you play it, but there are variations on practically every line spoken by the members of your caravan (depending on their age, gender, and job). This means translating the same line again in 50 different ways... And that's only for one line! Sometimes, this felt like a real test of will-power. It's not all fun storyline stuff! A lot of sleepless nights went into this one, but fortunately I managed to finish it rather quickly. The side effect of translating from midnight to 3 AM was that there were some pretty embarrassing slip-ups now and then. I have to thank the amazing debug team for doing such a great job not letting those errors slip through the cracks. I also want to address the issue of standardization, though. There have been so many changes to the Dragon Quest series throughout the years that everybody has a different opinion about what is the "right" way to go about translating it. When Dragon Quest was first introduced in America as "Dragon Warrior," it was full of medieval "thou hast's" and "would'st thou's"... Then it changed to standard American English... And lately it has changed to British English... We all saw monster names changed as Drakees became Drackys; Red Slimes became She Slimes. (Not in this version, though!) So the question arose - what standard should I use for this translation? The answer came from the story of the game itself. It blends the old with the new... The translation does the same. Many of the names will be familiar to fans of previous English releases from the Dragon Quest Monsters games. Certain other elements of the new style can be seen as well... There are also some unique terms and names that haven't been seen before. The dialog is written in standard American English. I know that some people might be frustrated that they would have translated a certain element of the game differently, but this would be the case for any translation style. There will always be disagreements, but the bottom line is that what seemed to be a lost cause is now finally in English for you to enjoy. I hope that you enjoy it. 7. Frequently Asked Questions - How did you choose the monster names? As with every Dragon Quest translation, many people will surely make a great fit over monster naming. Since the game was the last by Enix, we wanted it to have the feel of a classic Dragon Quest game. The monster names are therefore based on the ones used in the first 2 Dragon Quest Monsters games. Where names had been very obviously shortened due to space constraints we retranslated them as we saw fit (You will see Bubble Slimes and not a Babbles). The names are not open for debate. If they are a big issue for you, end your pain by jumping off the next tall bridge. - The Text Speed Option is broken! No, it isn't. It doesn't affect the normal dialogs, what it adjusts is the speed with which the battle messages scroll automatically. If you set it to 8, the game will wait for a button press before it shows the next message every time - I found a typo/grammar error. It happens. The game is huge and full of randomness. We'll never be able to test it 100%. We did test it to 99,99%, but we're sorry for the remaining 0,01% regardless. Send me (KaioShin) a personal message on the romhacking.net message board and I'll have it fixed in case there will ever be a update to the patch. Make sure you know what you are talking about though. - Will there be an update patch? That depends. If a substantial number of problems are found we'll probably release an updated patch later on. If there are only 2 or 3 bugs found, we won't bother. Given the size of the game and the amount of randomness, I'd say it's likely there will be an update some day. - I found a place were the dialog window wouldn't disappear after the dialog was finished. Yeah, we know of two places in the game with this error. It's from the original game. We didn't fix it, because we didn't want to decipher the whole event code just for these two boxes. - There was some text flickering on the skill selection screen This can happen, we are unsure about how rare/common this issue really is. Our VWF code is too slow in these situations, since the game redraws the whole text in VRAM on every single frame. The flickering occurs when the game can't finish drawing one frame when the next comes up. We already optimised our VWF code extremely well, due to the way the game works we just can't improve it anymore. We currently assume this issue is pretty rare. When we get a new idea on how to resolve this issue it might be fixed in a later revision of the patch. - Luin's hair changes to black when I enter certain areas This glitch is present in the original game.