Super Robot Wars F English Translation — My First Project Is Almost Here

I’ve been meaning to write something about Super Robot Wars F for a while. Every time I sit down to do it, though, I somehow end up going back to the translation files instead.

There’s always something. One more line that sounds a little off. Another character name that doesn’t match what I used three scenarios ago. A sentence that’s technically English but doesn’t quite mean what the Japanese actually says.

Sometimes I find a mistake so obvious that I just sit there wondering how I missed it the first time.

Anyway, that’s where things stand right now: SRW F is in the final stage of translation auditing, and I’m aiming to release the English patch next week. That’s the plan, at least, assuming the last round of checks doesn’t turn up anything nasty. After working on this for so long, it still feels strange to type those words.

There’s one thing I haven’t talked about enough, and it’s probably the strangest part of the whole story.

Yes, I started this one before the other games that eventually made it onto GameTranslate. Some of those projects are already finished. Their patches are out there, and people are actually playing them.

Meanwhile, SRW F has been sitting here, quietly waiting for its turn. Well, maybe not quietly. If this game could talk, it’d probably be yelling at me by now.

Looking back, I probably should have started with something smaller. Something with fewer characters, fewer menus, fewer lines of dialogue, and definitely fewer weird ways to display text. But of course I picked Super Robot Wars F.

And once I’d started, I really didn’t want to leave it unfinished.

The protagonist setup screen, before and after translation. Getting the little things into the game is a project in itself.

When I first got into ROM hacking, I thought the hard part would be translating Japanese into English. And honestly, that part is hard enough, especially in a crossover game where characters from so many different anime series are all talking to one another.

But then you discover that a correct translation isn’t necessarily a sentence the game can display.

Sometimes the text is too long. Sometimes the menu has barely any room. Sometimes the name you need to fix isn’t even ordinary text; it’s drawn with a graphic. Sometimes the same word turns up in a different screen, and you suddenly realize your terminology hasn’t been consistent for months.

You fix one problem and uncover another. You fix that problem and realize something else has quietly broken. It’s a hobby that rewards stubbornness more than common sense, I think.

Right now I’m going back through the script and menus looking for mistakes that slipped through earlier. Not just typos. The more annoying ones.

A threatening line that somehow ended up sounding like a gentle reassurance. A pilot retreating from battle whose English line lost half of what they actually said. A technical label that looks plausible until you put it back into its proper context and realize it means something completely different.

The translation table has more than 18,000 records, with over 2,000 glossary entries to keep track of. That’s not me claiming every one of those lines has had a perfect, human-quality final check. Some parts are already accepted, and some still need more attention. The audit is exactly about closing that gap before release.

And I don’t want every character to come out sounding like the same polite, generic person. SRW has so many personalities stuffed into one game: arrogant people, nervous people, serious people, people who are just hilariously over the top. The original voices matter.

Will I catch everything? Absolutely not.

I fully expect the first public version to have mistakes. This was my first project, after all. A lot of what I know today is stuff I learned by making mistakes while working on this very game. Some early choices are definitely not choices I’d make now.

That’s part of why I’ve been staring at the final audit for so long. I want the release to be something I can feel good about. At the same time, I don’t want to keep it hidden forever because I’m afraid somebody might discover a typo.

At some point you have to let people play the game. If somebody finds a genuine translation error after release, I’d rather hear about it and fix it than pretend it’s fine.

And yes, I finally have screenshots from the end of the game, too. Seeing the staff credits scroll by in English-playable SRW F was a pretty strange moment. Those credits belong to the original developers, of course. I wasn’t expecting them to hit me quite so hard, but somehow they did.

Then the game throws up that wonderfully dramatic Final Chapter Coming Soon screen. It’s the original game’s teaser for F Final, by the way, not me announcing an English patch release date for F Final. I figured I should make that clear before anyone gets too excited!

It’s funny how this all turned out. When I first began SRW F, I imagined it would be the first patch I’d ever share. Instead, other projects came along. Some went faster. Some turned out easier to finish. And suddenly the game I started with became the one that was always almost ready.

So now my first project is finally catching up with everything else.

Not my first release. Just my first beginning, finally getting its turn.

Anyway, I don’t really want to turn this into another huge technical progress report. I’ve spent enough time staring at spreadsheets, character names, and text pointers already.

I’m aiming for an SRW F English patch release next week, once the last audit and release checks are finished. That’s a target rather than a promise carved in stone, but I can finally see the finish line.

Thanks to everyone who’s followed this little obsession of mine, especially the people who’ve been patiently waiting for SRW F. I know this patch won’t be perfect. It was made with a lot of effort, a lot of trial and error, and plenty of decisions made by somebody who was still learning what he was doing.

I hope you’ll enjoy it anyway.

And maybe, after the release, I’ll be able to launch SRW F without immediately thinking about a dialogue box that needs fixing.

Although knowing myself, I’ll probably find another typo in the first five minutes.

See you next week. Hopefully with a patch this time.

— belfallen / GameTranslate

All gameplay and credits images in this post are genuine screenshots from the supplied Japanese and current English builds. Final Chapter Coming Soon is an in-game message, not a release announcement for a separate F Final patch.