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Pokémon True Blue

Discussion in 'Technical Discussion' started by Puto, Mar 24, 2016.

  1. Puto

    Puto

    Shin'ichi Kudō, detective. Tech Member
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    Part of Team Megamix, but haven't done any actual work in ages.
    So a little history lesson on the Generation 1 Pokémon games:

    In Japan, the first set of Pokémon games to be released were called "Pocket Monsters Red and Green", in 1995. They had really ugly sprites for most of the Pokémon, a lot of bugs, and they were a giant success. They differed only in what wild Pokémon were available in each version and what the prizes in the Game Corner were.

    The next year, they released a special third version called "Pocket Monsters Blue". It had improved graphics all around, several bug fixes, a mix of what wild Pokémon were available (so you had to trade with both Red *and* Green to catch 'em all), different in-game trades (honestly the most useful ones in the entire franchise, in my opinion), different Game Corner prizes, and a different final dungeon.

    When they eventually decided to localise the games for the west, they took the engine and graphics from Pocket Monsters Blue, and the data (in-game trades, wild Pokémon, Game Corner prizes, default names, etc.) from Red and Green, and released them as "Pokémon Red and Blue". Essentially, the games we got in the west were actually better-looking slightly-less-glitchy versions of Red and Green, despite the name of the second version being "Blue". A lot of people in the fandom are under the misinformation that "Green" is the version we never got — this is in fact not the case: what we ACTUALLY never got was an equivalent of the Japanese Pocket Monsters Blue.

    This is a hack of the English Pokémon Blue that aims to fix that: Restore all the data from the Japanese Blue version to the English Blue version and make a true English equivalent of the game that we ACTUALLY never got here. To be fair, this isn't particularly complicated, but the only other attempt at this I ever learnt about online seems to no longer available for download anywhere at all, so I decided to have a go at it myself. Additionally decided to tweak up a few things that were done during the localisation process.

    Changes done so far are:
    - Inserted the wild Pokémon data from Pocket Monsters Blue.
    - Inserted the in-game trades from Pocket Monsters Blue.
    - Inserted the Japanese title screen logo, to make it more obvious that this is supposed to be an English equivalent of THAT, rather than the standard English "Blue Version", as well as the "POCKET MONSTERS!" in the Super Game Boy border.
    - De-censored Thunderbolt and Hyper Beam (they'd been edited down in the localisation process to reduce flashing, following the Porygon incident...).
    - Re-translated the dialogue surrounding the old man in Viridian City (in Japanese he was drunk, the English localisation censored it to "needing his coffee". This has been corrected.)
    - Re-translated a single piece of dialogue in Pallet Town that originally mentioned the name "Kanto" in Japanese, which had been edited out in the localisation.
    - Fixed a bug introduced during localisation that caused the in-game traded Pokémon to not go through the correct trade evolutions (wasn't an issue in the original Red and Blue with the Red and Green trades because none of those were trade-evolving-'mons anyway, but Japanese Blue *does* have trades for a Haunter and a Graveler, so this had to be fixed).
    - Reverted the "MART" graphic back to the Japanese "SHOP", because that change always felt idiotic to me.
    - Re-inserted the term "Pocket Monsters" to the intro sequence.
    - Changed the default names to the localised equivalents of the Japanese Blue names (English Blue names were adapted from Japanese Green). For added authenticity, combed through the dub of the anime and later games to find localised "equivalents" to the specific Japanese names, too.
    - Nitpicky thing, and this isn't authentic at all, but changed the background colour of the whole game in SGB mode from RGB 255,232,255 to 232,232,232. When playing on emulators, it got really annoying to have the supposed 'white' background always being slightly pink.

    That's about it, so far. To be fair, this was all ridiculously easy and only took me like a couple days, but eh. Figured something like this was worth doing.

    Current version: http://puto.pt/pmblue_20162403.gb
     
  2. Jeffery Mewtamer

    Jeffery Mewtamer

    Blind Bookworm Member
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    While I'd rather have a FRLG hack to make a Water Blue or Electric yellow version, this is still pretty cool, and I wish I could see well enough to play it.

    On a related note, are there any plain-text guides online that give an area-by-area breakdown of differences between versions with things such as wild mon distribution on each route, what each in-game trade trainer wants and is giving, etc.?

    Though, I wonder if trading between JP BY or True Blue and US Yellow alone is enough to get all 150.
     
  3. winterhell

    winterhell

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    Could the mistake be due to a mistranslation?
    Japanese games are notorious for poor localization.
    They have a word that means both blue and green, and they have a word for green as well. Sometimes they go 'fuck it' and straight go for the English word 'green'.
    "Ao is also the name for the color of a traffic light, "green" in English. However, most other objects—a green car, a green sweater, and so forth—will generally be called midori."- Wikipedia
     
  4. Puto

    Puto

    Shin'ichi Kudō, detective. Tech Member
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    Part of Team Megamix, but haven't done any actual work in ages.
    No. The Japanese game said 'GREEN VERSION' in English on the title screen. And there is no "mistake". They just didn't see a need to bring the Japanese Blue version over because the first English games already had the updated graphics.

    No to the former, yes to the latter.

    Unfortunately, no. You'd still be missing Ekans, Arbok, Magmar and Electabuzz.
     
  5. Ravenfreak

    Ravenfreak

    2 Edgy 4 U Tech Member
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    O'Fallon Mo
    Sonic 1 Game Gear Disassembly
    Well to be fair, you could just catch all 151 Pokémon within one cart by means of the Ditto Trick, or arbitrary code using the glitch item 8F. :P Still I'll check this hack out, I'm still having issues setting up the damn Red disassembly on my computer so I won't be hacking this game anytime soon. (Well until I can figure out how to set up the disassembly on a Windows computer. :v: )
     
  6. JcFerggy

    JcFerggy

    Do you want to taco 'bout it? Member
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    Nova Scotia, Canada
    GoldenEye: Source, Other Stuff
    I know this isn't in your goal for this hack, but I figured I'd mention it.

    I always wanted a Pokemon hack that was an American release of Green, acting as the equivalent/opposite? of Japanese Blue. It would have the original Japanese sprites from Red/Green, but with the Pokemon and trades from Blue, and the overall game themed as Green(Color pallet, title screen, etc). Basically a collective of all the content that we never got.
     
  7. Chaos Rush

    Chaos Rush

    AKA J.Matz Member
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    Well I guess you could achieve that by altering the wild Pokemon and in-game trades in this hack to match the JP Blue ones: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/876/