Fire Emblem series

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Metallic Blood said:
but I can't imagine it would be too hard to translate several old FE games with a team that would work on it in their full-time,
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Nobody who asks a question is ignorant, friend. I used to hang around fan translation projects back in the day. It’s way harder than you would think it is. First you have to get the English charecters into the game to begin with if they aren’t already. You have to find accurate, pleasant to read, fluid English sentences for any line of text (Japanese grammar is so dramatically different from ours), you have to keep the total memory space exactly the same which is very hard when you have each Japanese charecter (hirigana) corresponding to two English characters or even worse, Kanji which is one charecter for a whole ass word. If you can’t keep the memory space the same you ruin all of the memory pointers and have to reallocate them. All the while sounding good, and worrying about localization passed literal translation, plus whatever issues FE4 would have.

TLDR: not “hard” but definitely not trivial

ETA fun fact: most ROM hacks and fan translations, unbound by such concepts as cartridge space, allocate additional memory at the end of the file in order to fit all of the overflow text space
 
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Kier said:
Nobody who asks a question is ignorant, friend. I used to hang around fan translation projects back in the day. It’s way harder than you would think it is. First you have to get the English charecters into the game to begin with if they aren’t already. You have to find accurate, pleasant to read, fluid English sentences for any line of text (Japanese grammar is so dramatically different from ours), you have to keep the total memory space exactly the same which is very hard when you have each Japanese charecter (hirigana) corresponding to two English characters or even worse, Kanji which is one charecter for a whole ass word. If you can’t keep the memory space the same you ruin all of the memory pointers and have to reallocate them. All the while sounding good, and worrying about localization passed literal translation, plus whatever issues FE4 would have.

TLDR: not “hard” but definitely not trivial

ETA fun fact: most ROM hacks and fan translations, unbound by such concepts as cartridge space, allocate additional memory at the end of the file in order to fit all of the overflow text space
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I made translation romhacks for a couple NES games recently, The cartridge space forcing you to often be more terse with your translations than you might want is something to deal with, but I find the more frustrating part is when there's a hard limit to text size imposed by the UI. Like imagine the inventory screen is set up with the assumption that item names will never be longer than 6 characters, so an item name going over that would cause a graphical glitch or cut-off text. 6 characters is enough to write a lot of words in Japanese, but can be very limiting in English. You could have the item どくけし, only 4 characters, but the translation Antidote is 8 characters, so now you're needing to use a different, less accurate word or write something like Antidt.

You could have enough space in the data to write out longer names, you could use a tool make the rom bigger to make more space, or even failing that there's ways to assign multiple characters to a single byte so you can write more than you'd think with less bytes being used, but it doesn't matter if there's no physical space on the in-game screen to display it. At that the point you can only write weird shortenings or be enough of a romhack wiz that you can redo the in-game menus and UI.
 
For the longest time the FE4 translation had a broken ending for I assume exactly this issue.
I think with enough skipping and mashing you were eventually able to make it through without crashing but I honestly don't quite remember.

Draft race ranks back then might've been calculated manually by counting turns and EXP.
 
Finn is the best. I like many of the Gen IIs, but the best guys are the ones who survived and became vets, Finn, Oifey, and Shannan.
Fire Emblem - Seisen no Keifu (Japan) (patched) 5_25_2025 8_53_23 PM.webp

I can see Oifey's thousand yard stare from here.
Fire Emblem - Seisen no Keifu (Japan) (patched) 5_26_2025 5_11_08 AM.webp
 
At long last we have begun Thracia. First impressions are great. It's just like Genealogy but tweaked to make it more "bearable". Don't get me wrong I like what FE4 did. I liked its mechanics, maps, the money system and the grand scale. However, playing it in 2025... I just needed some kind of auto-battle/enemy phase skip to get through the duller moments when you're just moving units around those giant ass maps.

What Thracia scales back from its maps it makes up for in aesthetics and streamlining. Everything is bite-sized now with some added QoL improvements (pooled Gold and trading with anyone). Having the context of Genealogy is great because the scene doesn't have to be set for me. Right below Awakening/Valentia the visuals are the most pleasing I've seen in fire emblem. The character portraits finally look normal, and the maps/UI are super appealing to me. FE4 was so huge that strategizing at this smaller scale feels really comfortable.
Fire Emblem - Thracia 776 (Japan) (patched) 6_1_2025 10_57_20 AM.webp
 
AWarmToiletSeat said:
I'll admit. If you want to make a character immediately endearing to me, all you have to do is make them say some variant of "I don't deserve to be happy". So many of my favorites are exactly that.
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🤨

A lot of what people say about Bernie is tru-ish BUT she has the nicest condolences after Jeralt dies so i won't let anyone say she isn't a nice person (I would single out Ingrid as the girl who is a Nice Girl™ that does nothing nice). As for the comic relief, your mileage will vary. I sort of dislike the trend where people pretend they didn't eat it up when it was new though. Not you guys specifically but much of the fanbase does this.

The fanbase has also ruined Ingrid criticism by making it all about being racist for 5 minutes and not being bisexual. And made the meme of Sylvain and Dorothea being Male and Female mirrors of one another (maybe if you're deeply misandrist that fits but Sylvain is actually a bad person and not just flawed). So I think they're a bad influence.
 
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I do find it amusing that nearly 8 years later we’re still discussing 3H charecters and not a word has been said about engages cast. Granted I can’t remember any of their names either so it checks out.
 
Kier said:
I do find it amusing that nearly 8 years later we’re still discussing 3H charecters and not a word has been said about engages cast. Granted I can’t remember any of their names either so it checks out.
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I feel like a new one should be getting announced soon...
 
Kier said:
I do find it amusing that nearly 8 years later we’re still discussing 3H charecters and not a word has been said about engages cast. Granted I can’t remember any of their names either so it checks out.
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Considering everything outside of the actual Gameplay of Engage made me want to Kurt Cobain myself - I beat that game off of spite and muting it to listen to a True Crime Podcast - I can understand why no one cared about the Engage cast

Then again, what little I remember about any of them is that they’re all incredibly one note - to the point the Hoshido cast in Fates seemed well written - so that probably doesn’t help…
 
Kier said:
I do find it amusing that nearly 8 years later we’re still discussing 3H charecters and not a word has been said about engages cast. Granted I can’t remember any of their names either so it checks out.
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That's not fair, there's the um the nu-metal clown vtuber, and the ninja clown with glitter stickers and um... the big titty goth gf...
 
I see it's that time of year again (pride month) where we both pretend that characters like Manuela and Bernadetta and Kronya don't exist, or that we actually played Engage or read its supports
 
Kier said:
I do find it amusing that nearly 8 years later we’re still discussing 3H charecters and not a word has been said about engages cast. Granted I can’t remember any of their names either so it checks out.
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I like Citrine for no other reason than that she is voiced by my favorite JP VA. Ikumi Hasegawa. And my bizarre sound autism compels me to associate her with the Rarted Vampire.
tsukihime-arcueid-glasses.webp
 
Kier said:
I do find it amusing that nearly 8 years later we’re still discussing 3H charecters and not a word has been said about engages cast. Granted I can’t remember any of their names either so it checks out.
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Even though all the characters look different, none of them are remarkable enough to remember. I only remember Timerra and Fogados design because they look black washed.

Also Mangs and Speedwing are in drama. Good news is, its not gay retard shit, they're talking about Revelations
 
Kier said:
I do find it amusing that nearly 8 years later we’re still discussing 3H charecters and not a word has been said about engages cast. Granted I can’t remember any of their names either so it checks out.
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That's because 3H had storytelling and characters that were, at the very very least, decent.
Engage is literally a turd on the side of the road that someone poured rainbow glitter on top of and whoever approved of it should be fired. Screw the Vtuber designs too. Ugly as sin.
 
Jesus Swept said:
That's not fair, there's the um the nu-metal clown vtuber, and the ninja clown with glitter stickers and um... the big titty goth gf...
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Hey! Give my "Hiya Papaya" the respect that she deserves, because she was the only Engage character that I remotely found interesting in that game :mad:

I also liked Panette, but that's mainly because her design just screams "Halloween" and I can't really say no to that (even if it looks like Vtuber garbage). Her berserk dialogue is also pretty hilarious to hear.
 
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