Will Yakuman DS finally be translated?

SDA · Mar 19, 2022

I've hold it as long as I could, but in the end I gave up. I want Yakuman DS to be translated into English language. You know, I like playing Mahjong and stuff like that - I'm pretty good at it as I play it all the time on Club House Games (the DS game). Now I'd like to try Yakuman as well.

The only stuff I could translate are the character names and a few other things. Sure, I may not understand nor read Japanese, but I know what these words mean:

マリオ means Mario
ルイージ means Luigi
ピーチ means Peach
ヨッシー means Yoshi
クッパ means Bowser
クリボー means Goomba
テレサ means Boo

...and so on.

TheRaven81 · Jan 3, 2023

Someone was working on it a long while ago, but nothing substantial or useable ever came out of it.
https://gbatemp.net/threads/translation-of-a-nds-competitive-mahjong-title.321397/

which is a bummer, because it's one of my favorite board games to play. The biggest bummer is nothing by the name Mahjong in English was the actual 4-player game. It was all just Mahjong Solitaire (which I guess is commonly known by the name "Shanghai").

SDA · Jan 3, 2023

TheRaven81 said:
Someone was working on it a long while ago, but nothing substantial or useable ever came out of it.
https://gbatemp.net/threads/translation-of-a-nds-competitive-mahjong-title.321397/

which is a bummer, because it's one of my favorite board games to play. The biggest bummer is nothing by the name Mahjong in English was the actual 4-player game. It was all just Mahjong Solitaire (which I guess is commonly known by the name "Shanghai").

Well this game is not hard to translate, it's all about Mario and his friends. However, some knowledge on the original Yakuman game is recommended here to better understand the words used by this game (e.g. Chiitoitsu means "Seven Pairs").

TheRaven81 · Jan 4, 2023

SDA said:
Well this game is not hard to translate, it's all about Mario and his friends. However, some knowledge on the original Yakuman game is recommended here to better understand the words used by this game (e.g. Chiitoitsu means "Seven Pairs").

The Yakuman games are based upon Riichi (Reach) Mahjong, sometimes just referred to as "Japanese Mahjong".
A lot of information can be had on the games' wiki ( https://riichi.wiki/Main_Page ), if one is unfamiliar with it.

SDA · Tuesday at 2:13 PM

Bumping this thread solely to say that after all this time, I still want this game to be translated to English.

And to be more specific, the original version released in 2005, not the Wi-Fi Taiō re-release from the following year. The only addition is the online multiplayer mode, and because the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection is long gone, there is no point in translating that version of the game.

its_soupgirl · 2026-08-20T00:45:55+0100

Did some poking around and it seems to be a bit of an in-depth process since all the dialogue seems to be handled via sprites, making translation a more manual process instead of something like string editing. I edited one of the main menu's sprite sheets as a test, and there seems to be some quirks (unsure why the description is a little corrupted), but it does work:

I think that, if someone were to go through with something like this, the WiFi version would honestly be the ideal candidate, since if Wiimfi ever comes around to supporting it, this could be a neat way of playing online mahjong. I probably won't get very far (or accurate results) with just google translate, though. Making the menus and text look accurate to the base game seems quite time consuming, but possible.

Will Yakuman DS finally be translated?

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