******************************************************************************** * Moldorian ~ The Sisters of Light and Darkness ~ * * English Translation Patch * * v1.1 (23 Aug 2019) * * * * TheMajinZenki -- Translation * * Supper -- Hacking * * cccmar -- Editing and Testing * * Xanathis -- Testing and Editing * * Filler -- Original Script Dump * * Novyal -- Manual Scanslation * ******************************************************************************** In the village of Keuzon within the Human Realm of Moldoria lives a boy named Navarre, shunned by his peers as a coward and weakling. His only real companion is Miria, his friend since childhood. One day, goaded by a village boy, Navarre ventures with Miria to a cave near the village to prove his strength. But unbeknownst to any of them, dark forces are at work upon the land, and Navarre will soon find himself swept up in an adventure beyond his imagination... Moldorian: The Sisters of Light and Darkness is a 1994 RPG for the Sega Game Gear. It's notable for its unusual combat system (read the manual, we translated it for a reason!) and a quality soundtrack by the esteemed Hitoshi Sakimoto. This patch fully translates the game into English. **************************************** * Table of Contents * **************************************** I. Patching Instructions II. Authors' Comments III. Secret Cutscene IV. Manual Scanslation V. Version History **************************************** * I. Patching Instructions * **************************************** You'll first need a ROM image of Moldorian: Hikari to Yami no Sister (sometimes identified as "Moldorian: Hikari to Yami no Shimai", or "Moldorian: Hikari to Yami no Kyoudai"). It should match the following specifications: No-Intro filename: Moldorian - Hikari to Yami no Sister (Japan).gg CRC32: 4D5D15FB MD5: 95FB42E84A2B08ACCE481B0894EA3CEA SHA-1: 0DAD260B5357B2F61D1452BB73D8321CA53D7262 The patch itself is a standard IPS patch. Use a tool such as Lunar IPS to apply the IPS file to the ROM. The patch will expand the ROM to 1 MB, so don't use ancient patching utilities that don't support that. **************************************** * II. Authors' Comments * **************************************** ------------------- -- TheMajinZenki -- ------------------- I usually don't do RPGs since they're the hardest to translate, due to the randomness of npc, which makes them hard to deal with without context, but Moldorian seemed interesting enough that I accepted to work on it. The story is a bit of a cliche, but short enough that it doesn't outstay its welcome. I'd say the most difficult part of this translation was localizing the spell names. Originally, they were made up words that somewhat gave off a "vibe" of what the spell would be due to the name being based on a Japanese kanji or onomatopoeia; rather than simply romanizing them, we decided to do something similar and use words that give off a similar feel but with English. Hopefully they work for you players. At any rate, I hope you enjoy one of the rare GameGear RPGs. ------------ -- Supper -- ------------ So just barely a week after releasing Metal Max, here we are with another game. Zenki had already done the translation a while back, so I started on the hacking while Metal Max was still in testing and, to my surprise, got it done in about two weeks. I was expecting much more of a struggle. One reason for the quick turnaround time was that I did a full proportional-width font conversion this time around, which allowed for much more efficient use of screen space. Most menus layouts were simply used verbatim instead of having to be resized or hacked to use single-spacing. Doing a VWF on an 8-bit system has its own complexities compared to more powerful consoles, but in this case it was definitely the right move. The other reason this went so fast was that I did what I really should have done for the Magic Knight Rayearth translation Filler and I made earlier this year: use a hash table to remap the old string pointers to the new ones instead of trying to actually find and change all of them. This saved tons and tons of time, and I can't believe it never occurred to me to try it during the Rayearth pointer nightmare. We'll call it progress. Since Zenki went to the trouble of translating the user manual, I also added an in-game manual viewer (please read it before complaining about the battle system). Originally, I had a wistful note here about how I wished we could have done a proper scanslation, but as of Version 1.1, my hopes and dreams have unexpectedly come true! Check out the "Manual Scanslation" section below. Well, hope you enjoy. This isn't the best or worst RPG ever made, but it's at least worth a pop. Thanks, as always, to SMS Power! for being a great resource and a great community. ------------ -- cccmar -- ------------ Filler mentioned Moldorian to me a while ago. I’ve always been interested in this game, so I decided to find more information about it online. Unfortunately, there wasn’t that much stuff out there, and so I thought - why not make this one of our next projects? So, I mentioned it to Supper and TheMajinZenki and here we are. There were initially some issues with the text dump (incidentally, Supper had later found a full dump for Moldorian and Eternal Legend online!), but Filler managed to mostly overcome them, and provided a script for TheMajinZenki to translate. This game wasn’t particularly difficult to edit, with the exception of spell names, which are often punny/onomatopoeic in Japanese. The game itself has quite a few neat features, such as being able to buy multiple items at once, sporting a relatively intuitive UI, quite a few different spell types, and many enemies. Overall, it is a short and sweet journey. Still, I STRONGLY urge you, the player/s, to read the manual that was added to the game, especially the section about the battle controls - they’re somewhat different from your standard battle controls in most other turn-based RPGs. Anyway, good luck and have fun! **************************************** * III. Secret Cutscene * **************************************** During editing, a peculiar block of text turned up that no one could figure out how to get to show up in-game. After some consternation and subsequent disassembling of the game, it turned out that a late-game event branches based on, of all things, a secret button code that has to be entered during a cutscene. It's quite possibly the most primitive QTE of all time. This code isn't found anywhere in the game. It's also not anywhere on the Internet at the moment, so apparently the developer never released it -- it may have been intended for an official guidebook that never came out. In their stead, we're releasing it now. *** spoilers *** At the end of Highlandia, there's a cutscene in which King Pinion and Bucalli battle. During the cutscene, the following dialogue occurs: Pinion: "Stand back! It's too dangerous!" Bucalli: "You're still alive? Hmph. That works for me. You'll get to witness Pinion's last breath!" Close Bucalli's dialogue box, then immediately hold Button 1, Button 2, and Up simultaneously while the animation of Pinion and Bucalli fighting plays. Ceria will break up their fight, leading to a slightly different sequence of events. **************************************** * IV. Manual Scanslation * **************************************** Thanks to some spectacular work by Novyal, this patch is now bundled with a complete scanslation of the game's user manual! It's thirty beautiful pages of cool art and painstakingly typeset text, so make sure to check it out. Preferably before you start playing, because otherwise you're going to be pretty confused when you wander into a battle and your characters do nothing but shuffle around until they get killed. The translated manual should have come bundled with this patch as a PDF. You can also view it online on this patch's web site: http://stargood.org/trans/moldorian_manual.php Credits for the manual translation: Cleaning, Typesetting, and Editing Novyal Original Translation TheMajinZenki Scans Sega Retro (https://segaretro.org/File:MHtYnS_GG_JP_Manual.pdf) Endless Publication Delays Supper Fonts Fonts from Font Library: Ambrosia, designed by fontforge Basic, designed by Magnus Gaarde GFS Theokritos, designed by George Matthiopoulos Alex Brush, designed by Robert E. Leuschke Source Serif Pro, designed by Frank Grießhammer Bagnard, designed by Sebastien Sanfilippo Square Grotesk Heavy, designed by Natanael Gama All fonts are licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. Software PDF to PNG converter: ezgif Image editor: GIMP 2 **************************************** * V. Version History * **************************************** v1.1 (23 Aug 2019): * The patch now comes packaged with a fully scanslated manual! Major thanks to Novyal for doing an awesome editing job (and apologies for taking so long to release it). * Fixed a minor palette issue that occurred in the original game: whenever a character portrait was displayed, the window background color would darken slightly and remain that way until a new map was loaded. The darker color is now always used, as was probably the intention. This isn't the only problem with palette conflicts in the game, but it's one of the most noticeable. * Fixed a bug that was causing the horizontal separators on the status screen to not show up. * Fixed a bug that could cause the player name on the name entry screen to be displayed incorrectly when a character was erased under certain circumstances. The input handling on this screen is still kind of wonky, but that's how it was in the original game. * Modified the "0" character in the font to look less like an "8". * Reduced the width of certain menu windows to remove "dead space" on the right side caused by the translated text being shorter than the original. * Very tiny script tweaks here and there (proper use of "Your Majesty" vs. "Your Highness", etc.). v1.0 (15 Dec 2018): Initial release.