AIGIINA NO YOGEN - FROM THE LEGEND OF BALUBALOUK
Translation by Psyklax
v1.1 (20170627)

CONTENTS
1. Intro
2. Changes
3. ROM Information
4. Background
5. Gameplay
6. Final Thoughts
7. Credits

INTRO
This is a 100% English translation of
Aigiina no Yogen - From The Legend of Balubalouk.
The introduction, title screen, password system and all
non-player character dialogue has been translated, and the
originally English ending has been corrected to fix errors
in spelling, vocabulary and grammar.

CHANGES
- INTRODUCTION
 Changed from 8x16 to 8x8 text
 Made the text scroll 50%
 slower (there was too much new English text to comfortably
 read at the normal speed)
- TITLE SCREEN
 Translated the title
 Translated Vic Tokai's logo
- PASSWORD SCREENS
 Translated the 'oracle's' dialogue, including a line that
 read (in English) "I LONG FOR YOUR ANOTHER CHALLENGE"
- NPC DIALOGUE
 Changed text window from 16x3 to 20x3
 Used DTE routine to compress text
- ENDING
 Corrected various spelling, vocabulary and grammar
 items (originally written in English)
- VERSION 1.1 CHANGES
 Added an apostrophe when you buy a magic key from a merchant
 Translated Vic Tokai's logo in the ending

ROM INFORMATION
GoodNES name:
Aigiina no Yogen - From The Legend of Balubalouk (J) [!].nes
CRC32: 04FC4764

BACKGROUND
Originally released on 21 November 1986, Aighina's Prophecy
is an arcade-style action game by Vic Tokai, intended as a
sequel to Baluba-Louk No Densetsu, which was only released
in the arcade. It is among the first Famicom games to make
use of large amounts of Japanese text, thanks to the use of
memory management controller (MMC) chips to get around the
limitations of Famicom hardware. This Famicom version never
saw an English language release. An English prototype was
apparently found, but it was never dumped to a ROM file and
the whereabouts of the cartridge appear to be unknown at
time of writing, so its existence is questionable.
Interestingly, the game was released in Europe on the
Commodore 64, in English, and it plays in a similar fashion
to the Famicom version. However, although the English
translation was useful to help with a few lines, I generally
ignored it in favour of translating from the original
language myself. The main reasons were that I couldn't find
all of the text equivalents in the disk file that I used,
and I couldn't seem to get the game working in emulation:
the scrolling didn't work properly, and I couldn't figure
out how to solve the problem.

GAMEPLAY
For first time players the game seems confusing, but play is
relatively simple. The player hits platforms from beneath,
revealing a two-way gun weapon. The player can then jump
when standing on the weapon, causing it to fire and kill any
enemies nearby. You can jump higher by holding up then
jumping with A (this is essential at points in the game).
You can find items which you pick up using down+A. Items
include a weapon that shoots everything in sight, a ball
that defends you from enemies, and temporary
invulnerability. You can activate these weapons by pressing
A+B. You can also collect keys to open chests, and money to
pay merchants and translators. The latter will read ancient
documents and stone tablets found in the chests. These can
provide very useful information, but often tell you nothing
special - and occasionally are complete nonsense.

Each room is passed by killing 10 enemies and walking
through the exit: the exit will then stay open forever (this
is useful because you may need to return to different
places). The ultimate goal is to find the five pieces of the
Aura star, which are all hidden in secret rooms. How to find
those rooms is the real challenge of the game, but the
documents and tablets you find may help you locate them.

FINAL THOUGHTS
This was by far the most hack-heavy game I've worked on thus
far. Not only did I use Dual Tile Encoding to get around the
problem of a lack of ROM space - often an issue on early
NES/Famicom titles like this - but I also helped the screen
space issue by forcing the game to use 20 characters per
line in the NPC dialogues, instead of 16. It's a natural
number for a computer, but this game used two lines in
memory for each line: the top line is used for furigana (the
marks above kana that say if the character is voiced, so
'ka' becomes 'ga' etc). I just took four of those bytes and
reshuffled everything so I could fit four more bytes of text
per line. Of course I had to stretch the text window, and do
some hacking for displaying new lines, but that's just how
it goes.

The intro was interesting because it was quite easy to get
it to display 8x8 instead of 8x16 (though I racked my brain
to figure it out). Once I had that I just slowed it down 50%
so you can read the text, because at the original speed it
flies by - hardly surprising since the original was 8x16,
therefore had half as much text per line (sort of).

The ending was easy to fix because it was already in English
and didn't require any special attention, but there were
plenty of errors for me to fix - and even some bad alignment
issues. Now it looks more or less correct.

The more I hack, the more I realise that almost anything is
possible, and you shouldn't give up just because it looks
difficult. There were times when I almost gave up with
certain aspects of this, but perseverance got me through in
the end. As for the game itself, it's quite fun when you get
into it, and if you can collect enough keys then be sure to
check out all the manuscripts you can. Some are a bit weird.
(I now know who Yoko Minamino is...)

Enjoy the translation, and hopefully this will lead to even
better ones in future!

Tools I used for this translation:
HxD (general hex editing)
WindHex32 EX (checking/touching up text)
Tile Molester (graphics)
Pointer Tables (dumping/inserting text)
DTE-Opt (making DTE table)
GIMP (making the title screen)

Other games I used for this translation:
Final Fantasy (font)
Conflict (Vic Tokai's logo)

Psyklax
http://s346165667.websitehome.co.uk/psyktrans/
