Collecting some notes for my contributions to the English translation of “FF5r-IC”, waterga’s impressive remake of ff5aki’s “FF5r”. This project is made possible by similar work, done by clymax, as well as previous hacking done by Serity, who leveraged the legendary RPGe fan translation from 1998.
The main character looks like a generic NPC in this version of FFV! Parfait? Paffe? Pafue?
Dev Notes from the Author, waterga
The above are where I’m drawing my translation guidelines from.
Sometime in October 2024 I began playing through and taking notes on this romhack (真説FF5r-IC) by waterga, an awesome fan-made version of Final Fantasy V that’s fully in Japanese. I used custom “crosswalk” translation tables with the hiragana and katana spelled phonetically in the Roman alphabet, and puzzled through a lot of it with my beginner level understanding of the language. The full translation project seemed overwhelming and I didn’t know how to get started on the kind of logic editing that is needed to fully translate a complex system of menus and dialogue boxes.
In early January of 2025 my friend clymax announced he was beginning a translation project for this game, so I offered to help. We discussed it and decided to build out our own separate projects that could intersect. Whereas I have a knack for working with plaintext and sprites, clymax is skilled in the sort of assembly hacking that I am not, and quickly began to translate the game’s menu system and to sift through and fix bugs that occurred during nightly playtesting (done by another party who wishes to remain anonymous).
After about a week of building out my item, spell, and etc translation patches on top of clymax’s menu translations, I realized I had been working on a corrupted rom and that I needed to “scoop out” all of the changes made into a fresh copy of the game. Within the same 24 hrs of this discovery on my end, clymax succeeded in leveraging another teams’s (Serity & KainStryder) translation work from a prior version of this game (FF5R), to offer a nearly-complete translation of the dialogue in 真説FF5r-IC!
However, most of the custom translation work I did needed to be redone in order to align Serity & Kain’s work with waterga’s reinventions, so my timing in discovering my misaligned work couldn’t be better. I took a day to carefully copy paste my translation changes (in raw bytecode) over a fork of the current project that clymax had achieved, so I could contribute to this English version of the romhack made by waterga.
To further ground this narrative, waterga based his redesign of the game on a prior custom version (FF5r) made over ten years ago by a Japanese hacker with the handle ff5aki. And Serity & Kain used the 1998 US fan translation project of the original Japanese FFV by “RPGe” as the base of their translation of that earlier project, FF5r. So this version I’m working on will be the ff5aki - waterga - RPGe - Serity & Kain Stryder - clymax - xJ4cks version of FFV: “The Definitive FF5r-IC”.
I’m humbled and amazed to be a part of this community-driven, international effort to reinvent one of the best JRPGs of all time.
Located at
0x11F100
Original tilemap of the menu font 👆
FF5r-IC Clean v0.0 Icon/Table Adaptation
This was adjusted in the initial version checkpoint, made against clymax’s translation of this romhack. Collaboration ftw!