Translators and hackers (combinations of the two being basically unicorns) can be both hard to find, though it is usually translators in most circles.
I'm by no means a professional level translator or anything resembling a hacker, but I'm a CS student with coding experience, a native English speaker with an N1 in Japanese and a massive zoids fan who loves this game. I wanted to play this game for like 15 years and eventually just decided to start learning Japanese, partly just so I could play it, and it didn't disappoint.
That said if you have played it a few times can you sell us on it?
It's just like Zoids Legacy (which did receive an English release) except with more of everything: More characters and more zoids from more anime series (notably the inclusion of a Zoids: Genesis arc). Encounters are no longer random, instead they are triggered when an enemy zoid on the overworld catches you, meaning you can cleverly avoid wild encounters which were extremely annoying in older games, or you can purposely trigger an encounter with a group of zoids you are looking to gather parts/data for.
The levelling system for characters is awesome, with characters accumulating a large pool of stackable skills from which the player can choose 5 (i.e. +10%/20%/30%/40%/50% stat bonus for piloting Liger type zoids, or for being positioned in the frontline of your teams composition), and you have this level of choice for every single character as they level up.
In this game you can spend money on buffing up your zoids' stats such as speed, equip load etc as well as on levelling up their weapons. In Zoids Legacy, you could upgrade a zoid's default weaponry by a small, fixed amount that was capped pretty low, meaning that zoids with bad stats and damage were unusable later in the game since they were still awful despite being maxed out. In Zoids Saga DS however, there is no cap, you can pump as much money as you want into upgrading your starting zoid (or any other zoid that is traditionally useless but you love it anyway!) and make it into a beast. Because of this, getting money from battles never stops being exciting as you can't wait to get back to the Zoids Institute and do your upgrades.
It's a must-play for zoids fans, which makes it even more sad that it never got an English release.
If you wanted to learn ROM hacking then I do have a guide focused on the GBA and DS (link)
I have not looked at this game yet to see what is going on. DS stuff can have trickier aspects but at the same time a lot of what makes 8-16 bit stuff hard is if not gone then massively lessened.
I read the parts that seemed most relevant to me and messed around with HEX Editing some of the game's .bin files, and while it's not much of anything, I did successfully change 10 bytes of katakana into....10 bytes of kanji.
Would be nice if someone who's had a look around the game files before could help with:
1. Any idea where the script (dialogue) of the game is? I can only find item/character/zoid names and descriptions
2. Any grasp of how pointers for text is handled in this game, where they are and what they look like in hex?
3. Any idea how to decompress all the xxxxxLZ.bin files I can see in the directories?
My goal at the moment would be to just change one line of JP text into a line of English text without needing to use the exact same amount of bytes. The actual translation process would be the fun part, but I don't mind getting my hands dirty in the technical stuff.
