DS game only This is the part of the archive where I write down what I've pulled apart and how it works. The game is a Japan-only DS title with no English release, so most of what's here was learned by opening files in a hex editor, decompiling code, and writing tools to parse formats. Each section below covers one slice of that.
Pages link to each other where it makes sense, so it's fine to wander in from any direction. If a page assumes a term you don't know, it'll either define it inline or link to the page that does.
2D Art
The kinds of images in the game β item icons, magic glyphs, NPC portraits, background screens, the 63-page magazine system, and the 140 NPC stamps β and the rules for finding the right palette for each.
File Formats
The ROM's file organization, every container and wire format decoded so far: RESO, RESC, LZ11, SZL, BLZ, the Nintendo Nitro graphics formats, and the game's custom Konami extensions.
How the Game Works
How the engine actually runs: the ARM9 binary and its subsystems, the overlay system (with the per-overlay knowledgebase and three fully decoded overlays), NPC data and personality types, the crafting system, the content cache, and the sprite pipeline.
The Message System
How dialog flows from a game event to rendered text on screen. The four-step dialog chain, the message wire format with its opcodes and color tags, bubble vs window rendering, and the shared-payload trick the game uses to save space on repeated lines.
Names & Words
The 377 magic glyphs on the player's keyboard (sourced from 2d/inputmagic/msg.ofs), the cooking recipe slots with their variant keys, and the ARM9 menu pool that holds short action verbs like "Hold" and "Place."
Translation Canon
What we keep consistent across the patch. NPC names, currency, royal titles, class names, and how Game 1's official English localization anchors our choices.
Where to go next
The Field Guide is the "how it works" layer. Several of the topics it introduces have their own dedicated sections in the archive with the actual data, tooling, or browsable catalog behind the explanation:
- Per-overlay catalog β for deeper technical detail on each of the 180 overlays. Per-overlay pages with function listings, container references, and embedded JP strings, indexed and searchable. Lives inside "How the Game Works" under the Field Guide.
- Save-file editor β for inspecting and editing your own save. Drop in a .sav / .dsv; what we currently know about the save format is rendered there, with edit affordances for the fields we've verified.
- Translation viewer β for browsing the in-progress translation side-by-side with the original Japanese, across the entire ROM. The English ships pre-loaded; load your own copy of the NDS ROM in-browser to see the JP source alongside.
- Changelog β for the full version history with before/after diffs of every row that changed in each release.
- Patches β for the latest patch download and the MD5 / Delta Patcher how-to.
A note on confidence
Some of what's here is verified at the byte level β round-trip tested, pixel-exact, or confirmed by decompiling the engine code that reads it. Other parts are working theories that fit the data but haven't been proven yet. Where it matters, I try to flag confidence inline. If a page says "verified," I've seen the code that does the thing. If it says "working theory," it explains the data we have but might still be wrong.