psmd Regional Language Differences in Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon

[evandixon]

Officially, regional variants of Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon offer different languages: the Japanese version can only be played in Japanese, the North American version can only be played in English, and the European version can be played in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Unofficially, however, the North American version contains language files not only for English, but for all the other languages.   This thread overviews some of the differences between the languages in the North American version and the European version. Because I can't read Japanese and because it's very unlikely they'd change Japanese between versions (seeing how the Japanese version was already released), the Japanese files which are present in each ROM have not been analyzed.

There are unmarked spoilers below.  If you have not played the game and wish to remain unspoiled, stop reading now.

English

American English and British English (message_us and message_en) are listed separately in the North American ROM, while the European version only contains British English (message_en).  Because the North American ROM's British English file is mostly empty, this language comparison compares American English in the North American version to British English in the European version.

According to my programmatic analysis, most of the differences are outside of normal text and dialog. It seems that the British English version contains extra strings used in testing, as evident with strings such as "\A10D\C106Multi-Player test\C10F", "\A10D Modify Inventory", and "\A10DDebug Start Message".

I have found a few minor differences and have underlined the differences.  These are too minor to give any extra discussion.

• North American: Press \A09D to open the menu, and select \C105Move Settings\C10F to view the range of your party's moves. Moves with \A0C2 will hit a target through the corner of a wall! Moves used by big Pokémon have effects on a wider area. They have symbols such as \A109.
  European: Press \A09D to open the menu, and select \C105Move Settings\C10F to view the range of your party's moves. Moves with \A0C2 will hit a target through the corner of a wall! Moves used by big Pokémon have effects on a wider area. They have symbols such as \A103 and \A109.
• North American: \C200Online communication with other players \C200is restricted by Parental Controls. \C200This feature cannot be used.
  European: \C200Online interaction with other players \C200is restricted by Parental Controls. \C200This feature cannot be used.

Here's the most significant difference I've seen, present in personality_analysis and common:

Hash	NA	EU
431371926	\C200So cool! It's \F600!	\C200It's \F600!
1022575489	\C200How cute. ♪ It's \F600!	\C200It's \F600!

These strings are used to introduce the auto-determined partner after taking the personality test. Because gender differences are already so subtle, removing its presence even more seems like a bad move. It's possible they did this because some other languages like French and German have to assume the player and partner to be a particular language, but that doesn't explain why English is affected.

French

Following my previous language analysis on the differences between English and French in these games, I began to wonder how the North American version differed.  The sections I analyzed do not appear to differ at all. There are, however, many other minor differences.

Fixing Incomplete Translation

\A10D\F601がラピスゆかふんだ

\A10D\F601 marche sur une éphélite.

Some strings they forgot about, which is fine since the North American version does not officially support French.  Good thing they fixed it before the release.

Leaving Serene Village

Hash	NA	EU
11110968	Bonne chance, mon gars.	« Bonne chance, mon gars. »

When reading the letters given to you prior to leaving Serene Village (aka Bourg Tranquille), they added quotation marks to what the letters say, presumably to set apart actual dialog from letters.

Lombre

It may not be surprising that Lombre is Spanish, and they work in Spanish words to his dialog.

Hash	NA	EU
1748202028	Caramba ! Mais tou es encore une niña !	Caramba ! Mais tou es encore oune niña !

I only know a few words in Spanish, certainly not enough to be able to comment on why they'd make this change. The effect, however, is a slight change in pronunciation of "une".  Rather than attempt to describe it using words, it's best to use Google Translate to sound it out for you.

Entei's Roar

Groooarrr !

GROOOAAARRR !

I like it.

Misc

Some differences are there to fix minor grammatical errors:

Quel délice, ces jus de baies !

Quel délice, ce jus de Baies !

They changed "ces" to "ce" so it would agree with "jus" instead of "baies".  I'm not sure why they capitalized Baie, but it was probably a combination of striving for consistency and Baie being in the names of items (Baie = Berry).

Other differences are painfully minor.

Hash	NA	EU
411722759	Mais c'est une booonne nouveeeelle, ça !	Mais c'est une booonne nouveeelle, ça !

Upon seeing this, I wondered if there was a difference, but I reassured myself that these differences were programmatically determined. Turns out they removed one of the "e"'s from "nouveeeelle".

There's countless other differences, which likely the result of using the time they had to improve things as much as they can.  They can be seen here.

Others

If anyone's curious as to what other differences there are in other languages, my programmatic analysis can be found here.  I am not elaborating on the other languages here both because I can only read English and French and because it seems to be more of the same minor adjustments to improve the overall experience.

[Blue587]

The Italian version had Kecleon say "Griiigus" twice. I wonder what the logic behind it is.

Edit: Somehow I immediately assumed it was Kecleon, but someone made me notice it's more likely to be Cofagrigus. Which makes sense. I was so sure it was Kecleon that I didn't even consider anyone else.

(By the way, they also did the same with Zygarde and probably other Pokémon too)

Edited March 6, 2017 by Celeste

[suloku]

8 hours ago, evandixon said:

Lombre

It may not be surprising that Lombre is Spanish, and they work in Spanish words to his dialog.

Hash	NA	EU
1748202028	Caramba ! Mais tou es encore une niña !	Caramba ! Mais tou es encore oune niña !

I only know a few words in Spanish, certainly not enough to be able to comment on why they'd make this change. The effect, however, is a slight change in pronunciation of "une".  Rather than attempt to describe it using words, it's best to use Google Translate to sound it out for you.

Neither "une" or "oune" are correct in spanish, but "oune" pronunciation remsembles a lot more the spanish word "una" (which would be the correct article for "niña"), so maybe that's what they wanted with the change ("une" doesn't sound like "una" at all, in fact it would sound just like the masculin article "un", and we are talking about a little girl [niña]): https://translate.google.es/#es/fr/un. una.

[DryBones157]

Is there a way to change my Super Mystery Dungeon in Spanish? Sorry for bothering, but I want an easy way, because most of the majoriy of tutorials are usually confusing

[suloku]

10 hours ago, DryBones157 said:

Is there a way to change my Super Mystery Dungeon in Spanish? Sorry for bothering, but I want an easy way, because most of the majoriy of tutorials are usually confusing

Depends on your 3DS configuration. If you have custom firmware and are using LUMA cfw (if you are using something else, you should change to Luma), it supports per game language/region faking. If you don't have custom firmware and are on official firmware <=11.2, you should follow this guide: https://3ds.guide/

If you are on 11.3, you can still run homebrew, in this case you'll want to use HANS to run the game in another language setting. Here seems to be a good guide to run homebrew on 11.3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNXfDiFnI7k

I do recommend installing a custom firmware if you have the chance, but you can still use HANS in any firmware 9.x to 11.x via SoundHax (the youtube video guide). There's a step in between, which is stayin in 9.2 or 11.2 and use homebrew to run a custom firmware from your SD card, but I find this unnecesessary and more tedious than the safe and quicker installation of A9LH and custom firmware. The only benefit is that you can't brick your 3DS, but the current A9LH installation process is foolproof and has many security checks to ensure no one screws up, the only real danger is that you close the lid/suspend your 3DS while on firmware 2.1 (a step needed for installation).

[evandixon]

On 3/21/2017 at 8:27 PM, DryBones157 said:

Is there a way to change my Super Mystery Dungeon in Spanish? Sorry for bothering, but I want an easy way, because most of the majoriy of tutorials are usually confusing

If you have the European version, then follow what suloku said.

If you have the North American version, then you have two options:

• Acquire the European version (you'll need homebrew or CFW to play it on a North American console).
• ROM hacking - Requires CFW or homebrew. I haven't tested this and certain non-English characters might not display properly.
  • Dump your ROM with Decrypt9, making sure it's completely decrypted.  If you only have homebrew, use braindump.
  • Extract the ROM using my .Net 3DS Toolkit.
  • Swap the romfs/message_us.bin and romfs/message_sp.bin files.
  • Repack the ROM using .Net 3DS Toolkit.  Rebuilding as a CIA is probably easier (install it with FBI - it will delete your existing game/save if you have the digital version).  HANS will work with either, since you can use the homebrew launcher loader cia from CFW.
  • Try it out and report back how well it works.