Monster Hunter G (Wii) English Translation Efforts

[Skulrog]

Intro
Monster Hunter G for the Nintendo Wii released exclusively in Japan on April 23, 2009. Not just a simple copy paste of the Japanese PS2 exclusive released four years earlier, this version introduced some impressive quality of life improvements like native widescreen support, PSP style controls, Poogie item collection, and more. Information on this game has been very scarce in the west, and requests for an English fan translation have largely gone unanswered, though there is evidence of efforts to translate the game as early as July of 2009, only three months after the initial release. My goal here is to document what info can be found about these translations and help others find them so they can enjoy the game.

Basic Research
The earliest evidence of an English patch that I've found is on Reddit, thanks to user bencara65. Link

Spoiler

bencara65
2 yr. ago
edited 2 yr. ago
"There was a beta patch made by Dagarath, a user of Minegarde forums, I found years ago. Here you'll find how to patch your main.dol (in the data1 folder of your japanese game) : mhg-t_v0.3.ppf ( https://1fichier.com/?4utb1z9g35u8d00lva89 ) pdx-pom3.zip ( https://1fichier.com/?dmteazcdo9f8zlm9fgr9 ). If you want more info, don't hesitate to PM."

2 yr. ago
'Source : http://forums.minegarde.com/index.php?s ... 622&st=255 "QUOTE (dagarath @ Jul 12 2009, 01:49 PM)The patching is going to be done directly to the main.dol I will release a .ppf file, use ppf-o-matic and trucha to extract the main.dol from the iso, and apply the patch, then replace the original main.dol inside the iso, resign it, and burn it (or put it on a USB device, I don't have a USB device to test with tho)"'

All the 1fichier files have been removed due to inactivity, and the Minegarde link is obviously dead, with no wayback archive.
All of the other mentions of an English patch that I could find do not cite dagarath as the author. With the loss of Minegarde, I was only able to find possible clues. A promising one was the Dagarath Twitch channel, active as early as 10 years ago, with some Monster Hunter World streams only 5 years ago. Seeing there was a discord link I joined and after a few days the one and only dagarath responded.

Spoiler

So yeah, seems he created the patch back in the day, but since moved on. Dagarath's been working on a game for a long time, but little time and real world commitments have kept him from much gaming or developing. I'm glad we are able to find this guy, giving credit is important.

Present-Day Efforts
Despite the inactivity and low demand, the basic English patch has survived to the current day, and there have been a few minor updates made by various people along the way. I made a small update to the patch to replace the janky English which was available on the MH Oldschool discord as a pinned message in the mh-projects thread.

There's also a user on gbatemp who claims to have made an improved patch, Mr. Benjamin, though he never uploaded it due to low demand. He's not posted since 2017 however, and was last seen in 2022. Link

Another user on romhacking.net was working on a translation and hit a wall with pointers (that's the wall I'm at too xD). Link

Outro
And that just about concludes my current research on the topic. I would love to hear any questions, suggestions, corrections, contributions, or other feedback (including feedback about my writing and formatting), and this should not be considered a complete guide. Feel free to reply here or reach out on discord.

NEW UPDATE
Adam and many others have put in some great effort to create a better patch, it even includes some pointer editing
Check the end of this thread for the patch.

[Adam]

Do you mind if I ask what tools you use to edit the patch, I was thinking about editing some things in the patch to fix some more of the broken English and spelling mistakes that remain.

[Skulrog]

Any hex editor that is convenient for your system will work. I used MadEdit when I made my edits to the patch on a Windows machine. Be sure you have Shift-JS compatibility to decode the Japanese text correctly. Then you can open the main.dol file in the hex editor and find your text. The file is pretty large, I found it easiest to search for a known already translated text and then navigate from there.

One of the big problems you'll face is pointers. The strings need to remain in the same location in memory, if they don't you'll need to change the pointers. Japanese is a denser language than English, they fit more info into fewer characters and thus less memory. This accounts for many abbreviations or strange wording, it's difficult to communicate with more characters in the same memory space. To combat this you'll need to get into pointers.

The issue with that is that in MHGii all (or all the text I've seen) is stored in the main.dol file, which is the main executable of the game. I don't have experience with address tables and executables, but as I understand it changing addresses in the executable is a major problem. The dol file contains not just text, but code and assets from the game, all of which are either encrypted or in a low-level language like assembly. I believe you would need to reverse engineer the game just to isolate the text without messing up the code, but maybe that's my lack of experience talking. I tried running the dol through Ghidra, but again I have little to no experience with reverse-engineering and only basic programming skills.

I'd love to see what you can do though! Feel free to ask any followup questions, I check the forum frequently.

[Adam]

I don't know much about editing pointers, I plan to just work around them and see if I can make the item names a little better at least.

[Skulrog]

Good luck then! It'll be a puzzle for sure.

[Adam]

I'm seeing an issue the English Patch's, currently it seems to break all pre rendered cutscenes.

[Adam]

I have made a few changes to your patch changing 173 item/material names were changed to follow a standard naming scheme, tweaked spelling while staying inside the limits of the pointers, and corrected incorrectly named materials (event quest materials, Lao materials, Fatalis materials, Kirin materials, and Crimson Fatalis materials had most of the errors).

I'm going to look at adjusting and fixing Weapon and Armour names next. Then hopefully a few spelling mistakes that you left in.

I'll include a link to my modified version of the patch https://drive.google.com/file/d/14vdv_d ... sp=sharing

I have been writing everything down that I have been changing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

[Adam]

I've tested as many of these items as I can but cannot confirm if some of them are working as I don't have access to event quest materials, Kirin, some Ashen Lao materials, and Crimson Fatalis materials.

[Skulrog]

Wowowowow! That's some great progress! I'll throw your patch up on my game and check it out, I think there's cheatcodes somewhere that give access to multiplayer quests, don't know about event quests though.

[Skulrog]

From what I gathered the game has some cut and paste phrases that are used in weapon and armor descriptions. I'd tried translating a few of them, but the character limit and the cut and paste nature made it a bit tough. Got any suggestions?