ROM Hack Question/Request about furigana in roms

[Angely]

I'v been wondering for quite a while now how furigana is impleneted into a rom & whether it's possible to make an app that universally patches a rom or so that just adds furigna to a rom. This to make text heavy games more accesible & easier for people that want to learn to read & understand Japanese to play. I think this might get more people to be ale to translate games they like that aren't very popular & unlikely to be localized or translated.

I kind of like the popup furigana a bit ingame (i think Zelda has that?), since it's handy for games that don't have the space to show furigana in the text box. Can someone please explain if this is posssible to do on an app together with the normal urgana that's always visible? Basically I'm asking for an app hat gives you an option to add furigina into a game with a choice to always be visible in games that have the space for it & 1 that's that's not always visible.

 

[Deleted User]

snip

 

[Angely]

What is a furigana?

I don't have the answer to your question though.

I kind if liked this explanation.
http://legendsoflocalization.com/why-do-japanese-games-have-like-double-text/

Pics with furigana in games


Lol trying to answer your question, made me understand that in 3ds games they use Ruby to implement the hiragana, sadly I don't have any skills /experience coding/programming, so I can't make a Ruby app/patch for 3ds. If possible a customizable implementation be cool would be so people could change the color of the furigana or just add romaji instead of kana for the katana. Though I get that some furigana can be custom prounounciations that use kana (hiragana/katana) can make it incredibly difficult to make an universal patch. I still hope someone could make a patch/mod people can customize themself. It would be nice if translation teams that don't have full translation ready in cases like MH X to have a furigana patch for the kanji in the game that aren't translated to English yet.

I wonder if I'm the only one that wishes for such an option.

 

[DesuIsSparta]

It's not impossible but it's more difficult than you could imagine for games that don't natively support it.

As someone who plays in Japanese, I find it's easier most of the time when there's not furigana. But there are some games that use crazy archaic kanji and it makes me wish there was furigana.

 

[FAST6191]

I have not examined many 3ds games but given their similarities to DS games where there it is as variable as any text engine (sometimes it is markup, other times it is different pointer sections, other times it is full scripting engine...) I would go with no for universal addition, at least this side of a lua sporting emulator like those we see in fceux and desmume.

 

[Angely]

I see I already thought that universal would be very hard to impossible to do, I forgot that each game has it's own programming language build up too....,For an universal app we probably also would've needed a huge database of all games scripts, genre, complete rom layout/build etc. it would hard to patch a huge library into a rom, since I guess this also might require you to build a dictionary to be built in the game. My idea was to have a sort of raikuchan for 3ds games, but that's hard & currently not possible I guess xD. It might've been easier to achieve if there was already such a thing made for games in the past though, but I get why no one started such a huge project.

It's not impossible but it's more difficult than you could imagine for games that don't natively support it.

I was actually secretly hoping furigana support was natively/partially built in but just hidden in the script in most Japanese 3ds games with hard & difficult kanji, since most studios have at least 1 game that support furigana, but I see now that's not the case. I started to wondering about this after I saw that Capcom used furigana on TGS in the upcoming game MH stories, meaning they use furigana to promote the game at the show & I wondered if his was common for most games & with official release they remove hide/them depending on te rating a game gets later (maybe publishers have that option, especially with cero A games?). I also get that depending on the game rating why they don't put active/full furigana support in every game, since the game would be playable by everyone that can read kana in such a case then, so I guess it's also a way to protect kids from playing games with stories that's not appriopiate for them.

As someone who plays in Japanese, I find it's easier most of the time when there's not furigana. But there are some games that use crazy archaic kanji and it makes me wish there was furigana.

I also don't want to be dependent on furigna a lot either & seeing furigana 1005 can be distracting & tiring too, but I agree it would be appreciated with archaic kanji & uncommon & custom kanji's, since for a forigner it's even harder to understand what's going on if you're not used to them.

Now I'd actually be glad with an database with just the 3ds games scripts that have all the text/kanji's only, so I can make a list of most common kanji per story's genre etc. So it's easier to look up for me/make my own translation/notes.

Ah well I guess I can make a personal list of common words/list i expect in games 'm interested in.Lke fashion terms for fashion games etc..., common terms i rpg based by genre...

 

[Helmax]

When I was working on Dragon Quest, there were delimiters after a word for furigana. So if we took the same format and applied english hex, we could have the word CASTLE and put DARK above it in furigana by doing something like CASTLE{DARK}