Over the weekend a new “Willy Wombat English Advancement Patch” was shared in a Romhacking.net forum post that, when used in conjunction with last year’s “English Improvement Patch,” translates perhaps the final remaining piece of text-only dialogue in the game.
This patch edits the font tiles in 07FILE.BIN to create a 1-to-1 replacement of the Japanese from the “save/load/book screens” dialogue into English, something notably absent from the previous improvement patch. See examples below.
Vermillion Desserts — the hacker behind this patch as well as last month’s Lupin the III: Pyramid no Kenja English translation — said that this release is “pretty rough looking right now because of space limitations but it’s definitely functional. I’m just calling this a proof of concept right now.” This “rough” appearance is likely the result of the redrawn font tiles being somewhat unoptimized.
While this patch on its own only brings about a small change to a single screen, it does potentially pave the way for future improvements to the Willy Wombat English experience as the location of the cutscene dialogue — which had proven to be rather elusive to original patch developer Exxistance — has been located and appears to be editable.
We will just need to wait and see if this truly opens the door to a fully English Willy Wombat in the future. That said, as stated by Vermillion Desserts, “with this [patch], the [English Improvement Patch], and the official dub, the entire game is technically in English now.”
For more SHIRO! Willy Wombat coverage, read Peter Malek’s thoughts on the title in his #BestOfSaturn series.
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