Translating Sangokushi Taisen Ten - Part 1

This project has only been possible due to the progress and evolution of coding agents, as the skillset and drive required to reverse-engineer THUMB/ARM9 in the context of a videogame is limited to a handful of enthusiasts that are out of my budget.

For this project I have driven agents through building CLI tools with tests, debugging emulator sessions, building the website, and have also used them as machine translators.

Why?

My intention is to write this blogpost series as a diary for myself in the future, because as it has happened with many of my past projects, my brain ends up filled with cards from new MTG sets and I forget what I've done and how.

You can learn about the game at the translation website TaisenFan.

This first entry is about context and background. Jump to TODO Part 2 if you want to start with the tech bits.

Yeah, but Why?

There's this game called Dwarf Fortress that simulates the life of, well, a fortress full of dwarves, down to incredibly stupid minutiae. The system that interests me is one where, very rarely, a dwarf has a vision, a mania that drives them to build a mythical artifact. You have some time to provide them with the means, materials and tools; otherwise the dwarf becomes anxious, then desperate, and ultimately consumed by the mood, haunted by the thing they couldn't make.

Translating Sangokushi Taisen Ten has been my vision for 18 goddamn years.

I played it on release in 2008 and thought "Damn, I wish other people could experience it" because it's a good unique game that's only available in Japanese, which I don't speak. The way I learned how to play was by inference through context, youtube videos and lots of assumptions, which I understand is not a frequent approach for sane people.

I have traveled to the Japanese arcades to play the latest entries (yeah, SEGA has been releasing new entries for 25 years). I collect the in-game cards and merch and guides and other memorabilia and of course I have Collector Edition copies (plural) of the game. Some of my fondest memories of Japan are of sitting at the arcades and going back-and-forth with the locals using Google Translate to understand the nuances of the latest releases.

The early attempts

Tools to extract contents from NDS games have been available within the first couple of years of the console releasing. I remember, as a CS student, looking at the contents of the unpacked game and being paralyzed by lack of understanding.

Fast forward 15 years I've built mobile apps, websites, javascript engines, CLIs, developer tools, and big sprawling backend systems. I have never gone down the stack to assembly or bytecode, but I've been close enough.

I gave another look at the game files during the pandemic, and found that they were compressed and obfuscated in a proprietary format used only in games built by that particular developer. Bad news. A simple scan of the assembly came up with a few UI strings, but most of the game content was packed away in the data files.

In hopes of getting the project unblocked I contacted on Reddit an NDS game modder. We agreed on a fee to deliver a tool that unpacked the data files. And a few days later he made it work!

But the joy didn't last long. Inside the proprietary compressed files was the worst possible scenario: a set of proprietary asset files. Around 10 different file formats. Undocumented.

The modder ducked the rest of the project. I don't blame them.

The project remained dormant for the next 4 years. I've been working with very high intensity and spending energy on side-projects was a luxury I couldn't afford.

2024 came around and Agents started being part of the engineer's toolset. I used the project as a benchmark for new agent releases. "Could this one be the one that cracks the file formats?" It wasn't. One after another, disappointments.

Until Claude Opus 4.5 released.

Side-note: wartricks

If translating Sangokushi Taisen Ten is my vision project, wartricks is its dream project sibling. I want to make a game using the same mechanics, incorporating elements from other games I love from the same era such as Jump Ultimate Stars.

I have commissioned game assets, soundtrack, game design documents and UI mockups. I own the domain.

I have restarted the project in all possible game engines: Monogame, LibGDX, SDL, Unity, Godot, Defold, Love2D...and I never get past the first gameplay prototypes.

One day. No rush.

Side-note 2: learning Japanese

頑張ってパコさん。