Gameplay videos // Updates (Download and Source Code) // RSS
Other pages: ROMhacking.net // Google // Guide // Modding Discord
Rhythm Heaven is a series of games from Nintendo and SPD Group 1. The game is full of odd situations. Players tap-dance with monkeys, steal cheese as a mouse, play in an outer-space home-run derby, and so on. The Rhythm Heaven gameplay is simple: press buttons in time with the background music. There's nothing quite like Rhythm Heaven, but games like Guitar Hero are in the same basic genre.
Gameplay video 1
Gameplay video 2
Gameplay video 3
Gameplay video 4 with commentary (Wii version)
Rhythm Tengoku ("Rhythm Heaven") is the first game in the series. It came out in Japan in 2006, but never made it anywhere else. Its two sequels have been translated and released overseas, but Tengoku never was.
The fact that it was a weird, brand-new series couldn't have helped.
Since 2007, various fans have tried to translate this game. Thankfully, our team has finished the text translation. We now have a hacker and graphics artist working to translate any Japanese graphics to English.
The title of this hack is Rhythm Heaven Silver. Why Silver? In short, because this game's sequel was called Rhythm Heaven Gold in Japan. The name also had zero Google results before this project started.
Is the translation done yet?
Hasn't this already been done in English?
- Every bit of text in this game is now translated and ready to play.
- 95% of the Japanese graphics have been edited to English.
- 85% of the Japanese graphics are fully complete and very high-quality. The remaining 10% needs some work (spacing).
- You can download our latest release here.
- We have the ability to edit Japanese sounds into English and will start doing so shortly.
Why translate this? You can understand how to play without knowing Japanese.
- No. Rhythm Heaven DS and Rhythm Heaven Wii are sequels to this game.
- True, but the text is often funny.
- Other highlights include:
- 18 emails, several paragraphs each, are now readable.
- The studio has English songs. Now you can easily find the song you want.
- It's easier for first-time players to understand how to play the game.
- The Rap Men's (text-based) rap is no longer in Japanese.
When will the translation be done?
What will be included in the final patch?
- The text translation (mini-games, emails, etc.) is done.
- The Japanese graphics have mostly been translated to English.
- We want to see this project done as much as you do.
What will not be included in the final patch?
- English translations for all regular text.
- Edited main menu and other graphics to be English.
- Edited graphics for introductions of mini-games.
- Edited sound cues for games like "Marcher" ("Turn right", "turn left"...)
- New voice work to replace Japanese-language songs in games like The Bon*Odori, Remix 3, and Remix 5. We doubt that a fan-made dub could match the quality of the original Japanese soundtrack.
1. Support the Franchise
2. Patch Your Game
- Buy the game. Rhythm Tengoku is expensive, but you need it in order to play the translation hack. The game costs around $40-$60, it seems.
- Buy Rhythm Heaven (DS) and Rhythm Heaven Fever (Wii). Both are still sold cheaply (around $10 each for the DS and Wii games).
- Register the DS game and Wii game on your region's Club Nintendo website. Take 10 minutes and fill out the surveys for it, and mention how much you like Rhythm Heaven and wish Rhythm Tengoku would come to America / Europe, even as an untranslated digital download on the 3DS or Wii/Wii U eShop. If you like the games, let Nintendo know!
3. Play the Game
- Legally back up your cartridge using GBA Backup Tool.
- Download the latest patch.
- Keep an unmodified backup of Rhythm Tengoku.gba. Each new patch will require an unmodified ROM.
- Patch the ROM with Lunar IPS or a similar IPS patcher. Your ROM is now in English.
You can try these emulators:
- Use a GBA flashcart or slot-2 expansion pack for DS to play the game. Emulators can be used, but be aware that all emulators have slight slowdown. Play it on a real DS or GBA if you can. It's absolutely worth it.
- If you're using an emulator, we recommend making the D-Pad controllable with your left hand and the A/B Buttons controllable with your right hand (like you were playing a real GBA). The game assumes you play in this way.
- (Optional) Configure your flashcart / emulator to use a completed save file.
- If you still wish to play the game with Japanese text, keep an unmodified ROM on your flashcart or computer.
- This guide might be helpful if you don't understand a mini-game.
Windows: VBA-M // VBA // no$gba
Linux: mednafen // VBA-M
OSX: VBA // VBA-M
*These quotes were written about the untranslated version of Rhythm Tengoku.
If I had to be cast away on a deserted island with but a single game for my Nintendo DS, I would have to opt for the fat little imported Gameboy Advance nugget that is Rhythm Tengoku. Niero Gonzalez, Destructoid.com
But it would be a shame for Western gamers to be denied the game -- Rhythm Heaven feels as fresh and imaginative as the original WarioWare did three years before, and it features a superb soundtrack. Jeremy Parish, 1up.com
You'd think that the minigames would have trouble holding your interest with such basic gameplay, but this is one of the most addictive titles we've ever seen. Nintendo Power
Even with the language barrier, this is a highly recommended GBA import. Craig Harris, IGN.com
Famitsu review scores: three 9/10s and one 7/10.
...the best Game Boy Advance game that you haven’t played. Chris Kohler, Game|Life (Wired.com)
Well, what are you waiting for?
When I clicked the download link, I got sent to his twitter page.
Scrolled down a few tweets and found the github link: https://github.com/ShaffySwitcher/RhythmTengokuENPatch/releases
who cares. he is just trying to enjoy your work, just becuse of what he did does not mean you have to tell him not to play your work. this is GBAtemp, not twitter.
Personally, I don't think sexual harrassers should enjoy my work or any peace whatsoever, not without at least trying to repair the harm they've caused. Glad to see you're being the bigger person and not caring about the kind of trauma that sexual harassment causes. Good stuff.
no i do care about the trauma that sexual harassment causes. i am just saying, why does that have to do anything with your project, and there is no reason that somebody who has bad stuff should be able to play your game. but whatever you do you, i never worked on a rhythm heaven translation before so i am not one to talk
I was fermilliar with Nick Robinson but not the accusations so I went to research it and the very first video I came upon on the subject was CynoIsAway's video Nick Robinson | Innocent or Guilty? (Fired From Polygon) and after coming out of it, it seems the situation was blown out of proportion and seemed like the ProtonJon situation (minus the cheating). I don't know, it sounds like dog piling like what happened with Lindsay Ellis's Mask Off situations. If I am misinformed then tell me but it seems like a bit of a jump to completely curse this man or shade his appolgy as disingenous when it seems like one of the most in depth appologize we gotten on the site (Better then Proton Jon's even).
Also I am having troubles downloading. I got the 2 things from GitHub and a rom from Wowroms that works fine and patched them in with Lunar and I just get a white screen with some pops. Help?
--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------
Never mind the second Paragraph, I fixed the problem
I've found the same thing when applying the patcher, I cloned the latest from master is that not the latest branch? I actually stumbled on this project as I was looking for a game to work on, if any assistance is still needed translating text I'd be happy to lend a hand!
Edit: having said that, looking through the script in EN_SourceCode the text looks translated so perhaps something with how my patch has applied?
Edit: having said that, looking through the script in EN_SourceCode the text looks translated so perhaps something with how my patch has applied?
Last edited by Shubwub,
I recently patched this ROM and I just loaded it up to check, and mine is all translated. How about if you download the patch from romhacking.net?
https://www.romhacking.net/translations/1762/
https://www.romhacking.net/translations/1762/
Use a tool that can apply an IPS patch to the ROM. There are many different tools. On Windows, Lunar IPS is the most commonly used: https://fusoya.eludevisibility.org/lips/index.html
I have recently revived the hack from the dead. I'll update the issues (on the Github) for the milestones, but by all means if you found untranslated graphics open up an issue.
If you want to get in touch in the future, I recommend posting in this thread rather than PMing me. PMing means I wont see it until I log in, which could take a year. Other people can help too if it's public.
Got asked this via PM back in March 2022:
> Hello there! I am currently in the process of creating a decompilation project for Rhythm Tengoku along with the help of a few other modders, which is publicly viewable on GitHub. Since the Silver team has already done a lot of work in reverse engineering the game, I'd like to ask about the custom tools in the Silver GitHub repo, specifically the sprite editor and the decompressor. My question is, would you happen to have / know someone who has the source code for these tools? They would be a huge help in handling the graphics data with some modifications and likely have some good documentation of the game's formats as well. Of course, credit to the original developers of the tools would be given. So if you have any way of getting the source code of these tools, I would love to take a look!
I don't see anything in my files that looks like source code for the decompressor(s). If it was anywhere I think it'd be in here.
https://gbatemp.net/threads/rhythm-...thm-heaven-silver.330147/page-15#post-4858879
Here's a dir /b /s listing of my RHS folder. Nothing here looks like source code (I searched for .c and .cpp)
lmk if anything in there looks juicy.
I appear to have lost my mediafire account (and I've known this for some time). I recommend downloading important files and saving them elsewhere. If you want to be nice, reupload them to mega or something and post here.
---
Got invited to a discord server with people trying to "improve" RHS or make a new translation. A lot of what I wrote in response is specific to those people, but if anyone's curious about our/my translation philosophy this might be the clearest documentation yet on what we were trying to do and why.
edit: In the process of making this post I also found this YouTube video which apparently popularlized the meme that "Rhythm Heaven Silver is bad" which the community took as gospel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch1dycjHSL8&t=1570s 26:12 Cool man. "Rhythm Heaven Silver is bad" JAN MISALI: "There are several somewhat obvious issues with Rhythm Heaven Silver. it kinda tries to be somewhere between a direct translation of Rhythm Tengoku and an official-looking localization, and as a result it’s not that great at being either of them. there’s a bunch of examples where Silver just completely misses the point of a minigame, and parts where it inserts some fanon content, and like, it calls Polyrhythm “Built to Scale” even though in Japanese it’s literally just called the English word “polyrhythm”! it doesn’t even have the same Japanese title as the other Built to Scales!"
Who told you we were trying to be a direct translation of Tengoku? How do you propose we would manage that with no Japanese speakers? I responded to some of the criticism in a new GBAtemp post [this post]. What fanon content are you talking about? Ryan Williams is invented but I just went back to script_fix and the translation we were working from had an interview with Mr. Spaceballer (or whatever you want to call him). It opens in our literal translation we were working from with "I've just now in the void of space interviewed Mr. Air Batter!". There's a language barrier here; do you speak Japanese? I don't know how Japanese radio interviews work, but English interviews usually introduce the interviewer before performing the interview. I explain BTS on GBAtemp. Polyrhythm is a technical musical term I had never seen until Silver. To this day I only see it in technical analysis of jazz. I don't believe an official localization would have left it as-is. Fever's game is called "Donk-Donk", not "Triplets", and triplets are more of a 6th grade band term rather than high-school level jazz band. A non musical player has no idea what these terms are. I go into more detail about various thoughts and criticism of Silver on GBAtemp [here]. I had no idea there was this level of controversy about the game. But hey, glad my 40+ hours of work can get summed up in 4 sentences as "bad"!
I could go on and on with screenshots, but I've already wasted enough time. Volley Boy and Shaffy apologized to me, but it's Volley Boy's server and I can't reconcile a nice apology with the horrible way this server acted. Shaffy explained apparently Built to Scale is an in-joke about Shaffy's work and not a comment on the Silver translation.
Some stuff you might have been able to piece together if you (1) thought about it or (2) asked me:
1. I haven't cared about improving Rhythm Heaven Silver in almost a decade. The last patch I worked on was, looking through Twitter, December 2014 (8 years ago). I will play the hack, and I love the Rhythm Heaven series, but not work on any Tengoku hack anymore.
2. In a normal world anyone working on anything using my work as a base would get my blessing and my respect. The only counter examples are certain alleged predators using the translation for clout and ad money. And people selling carts without the people who worked on it seeing a dime. Other than that, it's not my game and it's not even my hack or my translation - TheGreatSirNiko did tons of the localization work that this server despises, managed a lot of timelines and work from multiple contributors, provided feedback on my localizations, etc.. We also had some great graphics hackers whose work it seems you are still using as a starting point, because GBA hacking is f-ing hard. We had excellent pixel artists who made, in my opinion, Nintendo-quality work where you can't tell the difference between the hack and the original. The only time off the top of my head where this isn't true is Polyrhythm/Built to Scale, because that title screen was made using 3D models and hacking it is going to be hard.
3. I'm immensely proud of the work I did on RHS. It's one of the biggest things I've seen through from start to roughly "finish". It also stretched all of my skills to the limits of what I could do at the time. I still mention it on my resume from time to time. You can gripe about how certain graphics weren't done due to technical limitations, or songs were never localized (good luck finding someone to work for free in studio Nintendo quality, and also good luck translating music while 3/4 of the people in this server will say the translation isn't 'accurate' enough). But overall we did what we set out to do. So many fan projects die off. We finished.
4. Translation isn't binary good/bad, accurate/inaccurate, normal/meme (?????). Something I learned on RHS, and re-learned reading professional translators who do this for a living, is that there are always tradeoffs between different values. It's not clear what the values of this new /changed translation are ("accuracy" and "exactly like Nintendo of America would make" are VERY EXTREMELY DIFFERENT goals, and the fact anyone here passed them around interchangeably is embarrassing). And for that matter, which NoA? NoA of 2006? 2012? 2022?
5. Shaffy picked up our work and continued it around 2016. I remember them being polite and friendly, and I loved that they added onto the work we made. I linked to their work on the "official" RH0 twitter and from GBAtemp.
6. Some text apparently is straight up mistranslated. I appreciate the translation we got (professional translation is expensive, so this was probably over a thousand dollars worth of work), but people make mistakes. Got tipped off to this on the wiki: https://rhythmheaven.fandom.com/wiki/Rhythm_Heaven_Silver#cite_ref-14
// --- Literal
//Bon dance[;
// --- Edited
The☆Bon Dance[;
#WRITE(RtPtr, $9CE84C)
// 0x8052b34
//これが いまどきの[l
//ぼんおどり！[l
//ノリノリだヨ！[l
//イェーイ！[;
// --- Google (new 2022)
//This is the modern [l
//Bon dance! [l
//I'm excited! [l
// Yay! [;
// --- Literal
//Bon-odori![l
//I'm/We're in high spirits![l
//Yay![;
// --- Edited
It's time for the[l
Bon festival again![l
We're all in high[l
spirits, yay! (NP)[;
"Modern" completely changes the context, but we didn't know.
6.5. We didn't pull text out of a hat. We looked at what we had, which was a very literal translation that we knew didn't make sense to English speakers. I've never played a game from Nintendo or anyone else that has as literal, emotionless text as the raw Japanese script that should still be visible in our source code releases under script_fix.txt. We then made tradeoffs about the game that we wanted to play. We considered the space available (literally how many pixels are there to work with on the screen), how NoA might have done it, what the literal translation we had was, what we thought the raw Japanese text actually meant (sometimes using Google translate, but at the time and even today it's not far off from the literal translation we already had), any official media we could get our hands on (official sites, manuals, art, sequels and their official English translations), and what was actually happening in the game.
Everyone in the server seems to hate "Cheese Heist" as a translation of what is noted in the script as "Stealthy Rat" (こっそり ラット). I don't know about you, but in English I've never seen something described as "Stealthy [blank]". It's technically correct but a bit crunchy for a native speaker. I've never heard of a "stealthy cat", "stealthy cop", "stealthy bird" etc. The concept of a "Cheese Heist" is also not based in reality, but there ARE plenty of "diamond heists" and the like. From that point of view, did I then theme the whole game around crime? Yes. That is an artistic decision I made based on my sense of humor and the dryness of the original raw translation text.
I don't think the sense of humor is out of line from Rhythm Heaven Fever, the only game I had played in the series before working on RHS:
The seesaw inspectors are
here, doing important work
to ensure the safety of our
children. Serious business,
you know. No shenanigans.
They then jump as high and hard as they can into a child's plaything.
This is a game series where you shave vegetables, pose with bulging biceps in front of the press, tapdance with a giraffe, and play baseball in space. Looking back, Fever is probably more zany than Silver/Tengoku, but I brought that sensibility into the translation. I don't think it's out of line with what the series became - DS, Wii, and 3DS all have even more humor than the GBA game. To be fair to the critics, maybe a RHS NoA translation in 2006 might have been more restrained. Note, however, that WarioWare did get a US release and those games were always very funny in English.
Here's what I believe is the text from the 2012-14 era of RHS. Judge and translate for yourself.
#WRITE(RtPtr, $9CE728)
// 0x8053148
//こっそり ラット[;
// --- Literal
//Stealthy Rat[;
// --- Edited
Cheese Heist[;
#WRITE(RtPtr, $9CE72C)
// 0x8053108
//あなたはネズミ。[l
//大スキなチーズを[l
//めざして[l
//ストップ＆ゴー！！[;
// --- Literal
//You are a mouse.[l
//Aim for your[l
//beloved cheese[l
//Stop & Go!![;
// --- Edited
I got a family now.[l
One last job, and[l
I'm out of this[l
business for good.[;
#WRITE(RtPtr, $A1B6C4)
// 0x805d184
Note that the success image at the end of the game does show a mouse/rat family, and the OK image shows the rat and his wife.
Rhythm Heaven Megamix, the official 3DS game, calls this "Rat Race". Despite the fact there isn't a race anywhere in the goddamn game. Unless you count the stop signal. But somehow there's no discord server full of people crapping on the Nintendo translation that they charged you $30 for. And I think Rat Race is a logical translation, but not the best one. It's funny, playful, quick, and evocative of the game, but it's not as accurate to the game as Cheese Heist. "Cheese Run" could be a funny one (they are running, and people sometimes make "grocery runs" or "milk runs" to pick up necessities.)
Apparently I already talked about the Megamix names before:
https://gbatemp.net/threads/rhythm-...thm-heaven-silver.330147/page-19#post-6454277
Looking through various wiki pages, it looks like there are plenty of games in the official English RH series that did not get a literal translation from Japanese. RHF's Samurai Slice's Japanese (悪霊退散) can be google translated to Evil spirit exorcism. To simultaneously want to bring in as many NoA translations as possible, while shitting on my and SirNiko's work as "inaccurate", shows a complete lack of vision as to what this supposed "new translation" is supposed to be. People in that server are also thrilled with the idea of changing the game name to "Rhythm Tengoku" in English which is the most clueless f-ing thing I've ever heard. Nintendo would never translate it that way, because Tengoku can translate to HEAVEN. Translator's note: kawaii means cute!
7. Nobody on the RHS team speaks Japanese. It would be very easy to have a more accurate translation with a Japanese speaker. I wanted to play the game in English in 2012. No Japanese speakers were interested at the time. I don't think we had a single translation complaint in 2 years.
8. None of this was hidden. We released the source every month-ish. I logged progress in the forum thread. If anyone was curious about a translation, the text was right there.
https://gbatemp.net/threads/rhythm-tengoku-translation-rhythm-heaven-silver.330147/page-4
9. Look me in the eye and tell me that if Nintendo translated RHS in 2012 they wouldn't have also renamed Polyrhythm to Built to Scale because two of the other games with that theme were already called that. It's a pun, it sorta works (although Poly isn't as scale-based as RHDS BTS, but Fever BTS is only slightly scale based). Polyrhythm is a technical musical term that I first heard on the translation. Most gamers have not heard of it, and I'm not confident NoA would have left it as-is. Apparently renaming Polyrhythm is the scandal of the century in this Discord.
10. New translations don't have to shit on the old ones. Especially when using the tools and research spearheaded by the prior team and having the gall to invite them to help(?) on the new one in some way. People still like the King James Bible's lyricism, even if it's not as accurate as later work. One Quixote translator said: "Any translation of this novel is the translator's account of his reading of it, rather than some inevitably pale shadow of what Cervantes wrote." He does criticize some other translations, but IMO, you can only criticize translations along defined axes like I said earlier. Not good or bad, but accuracy, humor, speed of translation, mastery of the original language, etc.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voice...tors-play-safe-we-get-mediocrity-9227050.html
11. You have this fantasy where Silver would've got made if it was just a copyediting job from perfect Japanese translations. Just tweak words here and there to fit the text boxes, and be done. It's impossible to know, but I believe I greatly enjoyed the work on Silver as it was, and might not have been as interested if the text was already in a near final form. This was a combination of a creative writing project, translation, copyediting, localization, and research project. Taking out any one element could've made it too boring to work on. You'd have to look at script_fix to see what was changed. I don't remember going nuts on the Japanese text. The impression you'd get from Discord is all the text is made up, which I don't think is fair or true.
12. Not only did I do dozens of hours of work on the localization you despise, I also:
- recovered an Atlas script and literal English translation that enabled the hack in the first place
- rallied together a team which eventually included people who figured out how to hack graphics
- Improved script_fix to allow for faster editing
- implemented the game's first font hack to allow more text to fit on-screen (this server also hates my font, despite it LITERALLY BEING A NINTENDO FONT). I'll admit there are probably more playful font choices. I wanted something easy to use, and the Pictochat font was easily available and an Arial-like unobtrusive font.
- documented anything weird I came across
- documented odder localization choices in script_fix
- found reviews for Tengoku
- took 100 photos of one of the only Tengoku arcade cabs outside of Japan
- Created a beautiful OP with custom graphics, detailed explanation, FAQ, progress meter, and links
- recovered almost-lost footage of the Tengoku team at dance lessons (referenced in Iwata Asks?) via Archive.org and some clever use of wildcards (which is shamelessly used in the same video calling RHS bad)
- spent 6+ hours capturing footage and creating a trailer which I still love
- Posted 4 other English gameplay trailers to build hype for the series and translation
- Archived, stabilized, and posted the only known footage(?) of a RT prototype (which is shamelessly used in the same video calling RHS bad)
- Tried to get the word out to members of the English press about the translation
- Posted the source every week so even people who shit all over one of the best things I've ever done can take it and make the translation they've always dreamed of
TLDR: It might be more accurate to call this a "localization" or "interpretation" of the original Rhythm Tengoku / Rhythm Heaven GBA. I thought this was clear throughout my posts, and with the distinct lack of Japanese speakers on the team. Over time, perhaps the in-development comments have fallen into obscurity in favor of a near-finished hack that never pretended to be a fully accurate translation. This translation may not be the most accurate, but at least we never shit talked all the amazing work of others that we used.
Got asked this via PM back in March 2022:
> Hello there! I am currently in the process of creating a decompilation project for Rhythm Tengoku along with the help of a few other modders, which is publicly viewable on GitHub. Since the Silver team has already done a lot of work in reverse engineering the game, I'd like to ask about the custom tools in the Silver GitHub repo, specifically the sprite editor and the decompressor. My question is, would you happen to have / know someone who has the source code for these tools? They would be a huge help in handling the graphics data with some modifications and likely have some good documentation of the game's formats as well. Of course, credit to the original developers of the tools would be given. So if you have any way of getting the source code of these tools, I would love to take a look!
I don't see anything in my files that looks like source code for the decompressor(s). If it was anywhere I think it'd be in here.
https://gbatemp.net/threads/rhythm-...thm-heaven-silver.330147/page-15#post-4858879
Here's a dir /b /s listing of my RHS folder. Nothing here looks like source code (I searched for .c and .cpp)
lmk if anything in there looks juicy.
I appear to have lost my mediafire account (and I've known this for some time). I recommend downloading important files and saving them elsewhere. If you want to be nice, reupload them to mega or something and post here.
---
Got invited to a discord server with people trying to "improve" RHS or make a new translation. A lot of what I wrote in response is specific to those people, but if anyone's curious about our/my translation philosophy this might be the clearest documentation yet on what we were trying to do and why.
edit: In the process of making this post I also found this YouTube video which apparently popularlized the meme that "Rhythm Heaven Silver is bad" which the community took as gospel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch1dycjHSL8&t=1570s 26:12 Cool man. "Rhythm Heaven Silver is bad" JAN MISALI: "There are several somewhat obvious issues with Rhythm Heaven Silver. it kinda tries to be somewhere between a direct translation of Rhythm Tengoku and an official-looking localization, and as a result it’s not that great at being either of them. there’s a bunch of examples where Silver just completely misses the point of a minigame, and parts where it inserts some fanon content, and like, it calls Polyrhythm “Built to Scale” even though in Japanese it’s literally just called the English word “polyrhythm”! it doesn’t even have the same Japanese title as the other Built to Scales!"
Who told you we were trying to be a direct translation of Tengoku? How do you propose we would manage that with no Japanese speakers? I responded to some of the criticism in a new GBAtemp post [this post]. What fanon content are you talking about? Ryan Williams is invented but I just went back to script_fix and the translation we were working from had an interview with Mr. Spaceballer (or whatever you want to call him). It opens in our literal translation we were working from with "I've just now in the void of space interviewed Mr. Air Batter!". There's a language barrier here; do you speak Japanese? I don't know how Japanese radio interviews work, but English interviews usually introduce the interviewer before performing the interview. I explain BTS on GBAtemp. Polyrhythm is a technical musical term I had never seen until Silver. To this day I only see it in technical analysis of jazz. I don't believe an official localization would have left it as-is. Fever's game is called "Donk-Donk", not "Triplets", and triplets are more of a 6th grade band term rather than high-school level jazz band. A non musical player has no idea what these terms are. I go into more detail about various thoughts and criticism of Silver on GBAtemp [here]. I had no idea there was this level of controversy about the game. But hey, glad my 40+ hours of work can get summed up in 4 sentences as "bad"!
I could go on and on with screenshots, but I've already wasted enough time. Volley Boy and Shaffy apologized to me, but it's Volley Boy's server and I can't reconcile a nice apology with the horrible way this server acted. Shaffy explained apparently Built to Scale is an in-joke about Shaffy's work and not a comment on the Silver translation.
Some stuff you might have been able to piece together if you (1) thought about it or (2) asked me:
1. I haven't cared about improving Rhythm Heaven Silver in almost a decade. The last patch I worked on was, looking through Twitter, December 2014 (8 years ago). I will play the hack, and I love the Rhythm Heaven series, but not work on any Tengoku hack anymore.
2. In a normal world anyone working on anything using my work as a base would get my blessing and my respect. The only counter examples are certain alleged predators using the translation for clout and ad money. And people selling carts without the people who worked on it seeing a dime. Other than that, it's not my game and it's not even my hack or my translation - TheGreatSirNiko did tons of the localization work that this server despises, managed a lot of timelines and work from multiple contributors, provided feedback on my localizations, etc.. We also had some great graphics hackers whose work it seems you are still using as a starting point, because GBA hacking is f-ing hard. We had excellent pixel artists who made, in my opinion, Nintendo-quality work where you can't tell the difference between the hack and the original. The only time off the top of my head where this isn't true is Polyrhythm/Built to Scale, because that title screen was made using 3D models and hacking it is going to be hard.
3. I'm immensely proud of the work I did on RHS. It's one of the biggest things I've seen through from start to roughly "finish". It also stretched all of my skills to the limits of what I could do at the time. I still mention it on my resume from time to time. You can gripe about how certain graphics weren't done due to technical limitations, or songs were never localized (good luck finding someone to work for free in studio Nintendo quality, and also good luck translating music while 3/4 of the people in this server will say the translation isn't 'accurate' enough). But overall we did what we set out to do. So many fan projects die off. We finished.
4. Translation isn't binary good/bad, accurate/inaccurate, normal/meme (?????). Something I learned on RHS, and re-learned reading professional translators who do this for a living, is that there are always tradeoffs between different values. It's not clear what the values of this new /changed translation are ("accuracy" and "exactly like Nintendo of America would make" are VERY EXTREMELY DIFFERENT goals, and the fact anyone here passed them around interchangeably is embarrassing). And for that matter, which NoA? NoA of 2006? 2012? 2022?
5. Shaffy picked up our work and continued it around 2016. I remember them being polite and friendly, and I loved that they added onto the work we made. I linked to their work on the "official" RH0 twitter and from GBAtemp.
6. Some text apparently is straight up mistranslated. I appreciate the translation we got (professional translation is expensive, so this was probably over a thousand dollars worth of work), but people make mistakes. Got tipped off to this on the wiki: https://rhythmheaven.fandom.com/wiki/Rhythm_Heaven_Silver#cite_ref-14
// --- Literal
//Bon dance[;
// --- Edited
The☆Bon Dance[;
#WRITE(RtPtr, $9CE84C)
// 0x8052b34
//これが いまどきの[l
//ぼんおどり！[l
//ノリノリだヨ！[l
//イェーイ！[;
// --- Google (new 2022)
//This is the modern [l
//Bon dance! [l
//I'm excited! [l
// Yay! [;
// --- Literal
//Bon-odori![l
//I'm/We're in high spirits![l
//Yay![;
// --- Edited
It's time for the[l
Bon festival again![l
We're all in high[l
spirits, yay! (NP)[;
"Modern" completely changes the context, but we didn't know.
6.5. We didn't pull text out of a hat. We looked at what we had, which was a very literal translation that we knew didn't make sense to English speakers. I've never played a game from Nintendo or anyone else that has as literal, emotionless text as the raw Japanese script that should still be visible in our source code releases under script_fix.txt. We then made tradeoffs about the game that we wanted to play. We considered the space available (literally how many pixels are there to work with on the screen), how NoA might have done it, what the literal translation we had was, what we thought the raw Japanese text actually meant (sometimes using Google translate, but at the time and even today it's not far off from the literal translation we already had), any official media we could get our hands on (official sites, manuals, art, sequels and their official English translations), and what was actually happening in the game.
Everyone in the server seems to hate "Cheese Heist" as a translation of what is noted in the script as "Stealthy Rat" (こっそり ラット). I don't know about you, but in English I've never seen something described as "Stealthy [blank]". It's technically correct but a bit crunchy for a native speaker. I've never heard of a "stealthy cat", "stealthy cop", "stealthy bird" etc. The concept of a "Cheese Heist" is also not based in reality, but there ARE plenty of "diamond heists" and the like. From that point of view, did I then theme the whole game around crime? Yes. That is an artistic decision I made based on my sense of humor and the dryness of the original raw translation text.
I don't think the sense of humor is out of line from Rhythm Heaven Fever, the only game I had played in the series before working on RHS:
The seesaw inspectors are
here, doing important work
to ensure the safety of our
children. Serious business,
you know. No shenanigans.
They then jump as high and hard as they can into a child's plaything.
This is a game series where you shave vegetables, pose with bulging biceps in front of the press, tapdance with a giraffe, and play baseball in space. Looking back, Fever is probably more zany than Silver/Tengoku, but I brought that sensibility into the translation. I don't think it's out of line with what the series became - DS, Wii, and 3DS all have even more humor than the GBA game. To be fair to the critics, maybe a RHS NoA translation in 2006 might have been more restrained. Note, however, that WarioWare did get a US release and those games were always very funny in English.
Here's what I believe is the text from the 2012-14 era of RHS. Judge and translate for yourself.
#WRITE(RtPtr, $9CE728)
// 0x8053148
//こっそり ラット[;
// --- Literal
//Stealthy Rat[;
// --- Edited
Cheese Heist[;
#WRITE(RtPtr, $9CE72C)
// 0x8053108
//あなたはネズミ。[l
//大スキなチーズを[l
//めざして[l
//ストップ＆ゴー！！[;
// --- Literal
//You are a mouse.[l
//Aim for your[l
//beloved cheese[l
//Stop & Go!
- No one is chatting at the moment.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
@
Xdqwerty:
@realtimesave, hey there buddy chum pal friend buddy pal chum bud friend fella bruther amigo pal buddy friend chummy chum chum pal -
@
Xdqwerty:
@realtimesave, hey there buddy chum pal friend buddy pal chum bud friend fella bruther amigo pal buddy friend chummy chum chum pal
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
@
Sicklyboy:
@Xdqwerty, Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! is the Japanese version of the game, different settings/characters/songs but otherwise identical mechanics. I played that before I knew about Elite Beat Agents lol. Both fantastic games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osu!_Tatakae!_Ouendan+1 -
-
-
