ROM Hack Question Any Chance of a FE:Three Houses font mod?

[Rasa39]

I know there's a general hacking thread but that seems mostly to be for save editing and cheats etc so figured I'd ask in a fresh one, but is it likely we'll ever see a font mod for this game? Like is anyone already working on one maybe.

From what little I know from the 3ds days of FE editing, text edits aren't the easiest of things, especially due to formatting of the text boxes. But Three houses is just rubbing it in with that ridiculous font. The size might not have been such an issue if the font wasn't some spindly ass scripture type deal. In game, both docked and handheld, it looks nothing like it does in videos and promos for the game where it's much more readable.

Is there any chance a font change can be made, or the font itself enlarged, even if there's a way to get 1.5x the font size or maybe bold all font. I mean those text boxes are so damn empty even with 3 lines of text in them, it's insane how they thought this was acceptable during any phase of the translation and testing (the JPN version looks much better). Anything would be better than the squint show we have right now, especially given FE is a heavily story based game series.

Just wondering since we have no idea if they are going to actually patch this themselves or just ignore it because busy busy making all that delicious dlc for the season pass.

 

[Syynx]

The tiny font is the only reason I haven't played this (apparent) masterpiece yet

 

[FAST6191]

Had a look and with a phrase like "some spindly ass scripture type deal" (also ass as a UK peep? for shame) but got a fairly normal looking serif font in the footage I saw. Still I can see it being less pleasant to read than some other games.

Font size increase in games is often tricky. Most console games aren't coded like PC games, word processor documents or like in big boy image editors.
If you just wanted a slightly bolder sans serif font though then that should just be a matter of finding the font in the game, and overwriting it in place (depending upon pixel size there are even tile editors that allow you to press a button and have the corresponding character appear). Adding new characters or radically altering character widths in some cases can be tricky but replacing like for like is nothing drastic most of the time. Pull apart the game and see if you can find the font (look at the file names, eliminate based on names, if you want to overwrite some things to see what changes then you can also do that), https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/646/ is a generic tile viewer so should be able to help find things here (do bear in mind that characters can be different widths so they might not all display at once).
There might also be a few different fonts for different things (the mission success thing looked like a similar font but being bigger and all patterned it is more likely to be a picture or other font) but if you are more after menus and text then you should be OK.

 

[Rasa39]

Had a look and with a phrase like "some spindly ass scripture type deal" (also ass as a UK peep? for shame) but got a fairly normal looking serif font in the footage I saw. Still I can see it being less pleasant to read than some other games.

Yeah I was just being lazy with the keyboard on that one haha (also like to save the hard R for when I want some extra impact). I feel like there's some trickery at work with the videos because it does look way better in those, and it looks to be the same font in the actual game(not sure if it looks the same on captured footage).

But yeah the difficulty is one reason I don't think we'll see an actual update fix anytime soon, if at all. I was thinking maybe the guys who did translations/mods for the previous games might know there way around it, given I think I heard that some of the mod tools still work for three houses files (not 100% on that though).

Seeing a comparison of the Japanese font for things like "HP" which is much clearer and bolder, made me think of the times translations used the roman characters in the japanese font. So cut off words was usually a problem but at least it was English. I thought maybe it would be possible we'd see a translation of the Japanese version if certain US/EU script files could be replaced and worked in with a bit of tweaking.

If I knew anything about it I'd give it a try myself but I'm just firing in the dark on this one. The font is legit the only reason I'm not playing this right now, just trying to get through character introductions in the first part of the game was making my eyes water. (and I'm short sighted so that shit shouldn't be a problem when it's about a foot from my face)

 

[FAST6191]

Yeah I was just being lazy with the keyboard on that one haha (also like to save the hard R for when I want some extra impact). I feel like there's some trickery at work with the videos because it does look way better in those, and it looks to be the same font in the actual game(not sure if it looks the same on captured footage).

But yeah the difficulty is one reason I don't think we'll see an actual update fix anytime soon, if at all. I was thinking maybe the guys who did translations/mods for the previous games might know there way around it, given I think I heard that some of the mod tools still work for three houses files (not 100% on that though).

Seeing a comparison of the Japanese font for things like "HP" which is much clearer and bolder, made me think of the times translations used the roman characters in the japanese font. So cut off words was usually a problem but at least it was English. I thought maybe it would be possible we'd see a translation of the Japanese version if certain US/EU script files could be replaced and worked in with a bit of tweaking.

If I knew anything about it I'd give it a try myself but I'm just firing in the dark on this one. The font is legit the only reason I'm not playing this right now, just trying to get through character introductions in the first part of the game was making my eyes water. (and I'm short sighted so that shit shouldn't be a problem when it's about a foot from my face)

It might not be a difficult hack, and if it is still within normal realms it would only be slightly harder. There are exceptions (things like all the text is pictures) but I don't expect to encounter them here. You reference earlier hacks and they do very different things to what you are trying to do here -- I can well see those ending in a typesetting/formatting rework but a same size serif to sans serif font with no script, character or other similar changes is a different matter entirely.

Find the font, find how it is encoded and as long as you are not changing size (possibly including width) and just making it a nice plain/easy to read sans serif font and you will be spending longer picking an alternative font to use or redrawing those characters by hand. If you do need to change the width then one of two scenarios probably appears -- 1) the individual "tiles" holding the character will be individually sized and you get to adjust accordingly (possibly all those afterwards as well) and 2) each "tile" is the same size (might not be a clean 8x8 or 8x16 but exotic sizes are nothing much for modern tile editors) but the font itself includes a size value for each character and you get to fiddle with that a bit.

 

[Rasa39]

So there's this E3 video that shows a much more readable font used in the game. So we'll probably never see a fix because chances are some designer wanted to have their way regarding the font for the finalised game, even though it turned out to be squint city. (speculation but still, why else would they change this, unless someone paid them to use this font, if that even happens)

Spoiler: Screenshot

Obviously I'm not experienced at all in modifying FE games, but surely if this font was there before then it won't take much for them to put it back, at least as an option in the game settings. (it could have been an edited video but I think the game was far enough along at this point for it to be real)