(I... am not actually sure if this thread belongs in this section (I mean, it does concern the Sonic romhacking community so eeeh?). Apologies in advance in case it doesn't.) Anyway, here's what I've been curious about. English is the lingua franca of Sonic romhacking, that much is for certain. Some people, however, prefer to build smaller communities where they can communicate in languages different from English. I'm personally familiar with the Russian-speaking side of things, for example, and iirc I've caught glimpses of Portuguese Sonic romhacking sometime back in the day. Recalling those things, I asked myself a question. Is there a Sonic hacking community based in Japan? I know that the country in question is infamous for its strict laws regarding the modification of video games, passed due to Nintendo's lobbying back in the 90's. It wouldn't be surprising if Japanese romhacking was barely a thing. However, that is not quite the case! Case in point: Rockman romhacking. Puresabe's still kicking with his advanced romhacks, still oriented towards the Japanese community, stuff like Rockman CX exists... Some other series have received a similar treatment, having Japanese-exclusive romhacks. So why not Sonic? General purpose fan sites in Japanese exist but I couldn't dig up anything about Japanese Sonic romhacking. Not even something like a walkthrough of a well-known hack that's easily available everywhere. Perhaps related, there's also the fact that M2 was seemingly oblivious to Sonic Retro's research efforts during the development of 3D Sonic The Hedgehog for Nintendo 3DS. They had to jump through quite a few hoops in order to get Spin Dash in the game and fix the bug involving outrunning the camera in GHZ1's tubes (source: https://web.archive.org/web/20170806200341/http://blogs.sega.com/2013/12/03/sega-3d-classics-–-3d-sonic-the-hedgehog-interview-with-developer-m2/). They are a contractor firm, though, so it may be a simple case of not knowing where to look. Maybe there's a legal issue with relying on Sonic Retro. So what is going on here? Does anyone have a clue?
I'd say it's 2 major factors. 1 - Sonic ROM hacking is much more niche than say Super Mario World or Mario 64. Which is unfortunate because I'd love to see this community expand more. I'm of the opinion that we're in a pretty bad state of stagnation in the community. How we get out there and get more people in is beyond me. 2 - Sonic was never as popular in Japan. Only until recently, Sonic was essentially just Sega's mascot over there. But it's due to the movies, Frontiers' more RPG-like design, and collabs with Korone that Sonic has started having a bigger presence in Japan. The hacking scene largely consists of people from America, South America, the UK, and Russia because that's where the Sonic brand is the strongest.
I agree with the second point but I'm a bit unsure about the first one. Sonic games are some of the biggest Genesis titles. And Mega Drive weren't a small fry in Japan - sure, it may had fallen behind SNES and... PC Engine, I think? but it sold well enough to earn a dedicated community. I know of a least one modern hobbyist that's been producing MD projects for over a decade at this point (rael16x is his nickname). Yuzo Koshiro could pull some people to make him a FPGA for his current shmup game. And yet I've seen more Japanese romhacks of obscure Famicom jRPGs than Japanese MD romhacks. It strikes me as odd. It also kinda makes sense, though...
The Mega Drive homebrew community is alive and well in Japan, this is true. Sonic ROM hacking is not. Those are 2 very distinct things.
I think some of this can also be chalked up to the simple fact that most of the tools and disassemblies are in English. While percentages vary, general estimates only put 10-20% of the entire Japanese population knowing any form of English, and actual fluency is much lower. Additionally, I'm pretty sure the assemblers we use use UTF-8 encoding for ASM files, meanwhile most Japanese computer users use JIS or Shift-JIS encoding for text. I do still believe that there is some sort of micro-Japanese hacking community out there, but it's just very difficult to find.
You're in the right direction, but absolutely in the wrong lane. Basically, they literally just make their own. One thing you have to keep in mind is that Japan actually does have a community dedicated to fan content, but the ethos is entirely different where they either create unofficial comics and publish them through conventions or develop fan games and hand them to friends. They don't really touch the games themselves and as such I traced this line of thinking. Turns out we do have a page on at least one of these fan games; Mi ni Ikuzo! Hedgehog I dug for some of this stuff for Cotton, but I've never touched Sonic if at all. There's definitely some Japanese fan games out there, it's probably buried in a Twitter thread.
