DS game only Almost no 2D image in the game is stored as a finished picture. Instead, you get the ingredients β a sheet of tiles, a palette, and instructions for how to assemble them. To render an image you have to find those three things, match them up correctly, and run the composition.
The big practical problem is that the palette for a given image often lives somewhere else. The next few pages cover the kinds of art and the rules for finding their palettes.
The kinds of art
Item icons, magic glyphs, NPC portraits, background screens, UI sprites. What each kind is for, where it lives, and roughly how many of each exist.
Finding the right palette
The five-rule hierarchy for matching a tile sheet to its colors. Why item icons "look broken" until you find the palette inside global.lzs.
Composition recipes
How a shop screen gets assembled at runtime from a handful of sprite chips and an XY table. The buyitem screen, fully worked.
The magazine system
63 in-game magazine pages plus an index, a frame, and a trophy table. Every Japanese word is baked into the pixels β translating them means redrawing them.
NPC stamps
140 character stamps used in mail and bio sheets, all sharing a single 512-byte palette. Plus the stamp-picker UI frame.
How many images are there?
We catalogued 4,337 sets of tile graphics across the game. Each set has siblings (a palette, sometimes an OAM sprite definition, sometimes a background tilemap) telling us how to render it. The breakdown:
| Kind of art | Count | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Background screens | 1,100 | Full 256Γ192 backgrounds assembled from a tilemap. Shop interiors, menus, title art. |
| Sprite cells | 704 | Animated or composite sprites assembled from many small "OBJ" chips. Character poses, UI widgets. |
| Tile banks | 296 | Loose tile sheets without explicit composition. Often atlases. |
| Orphans (palette comes from elsewhere) | 2,237 | Item icons, magic glyphs, and other sets whose palette is pinned somewhere outside the container. |
Of the 2,237 orphan tile sheets, we resolved 1,637 by finding their
external palettes (656 item icons, 823 magic glyphs, plus shared-palette
containers). The remaining 600 are mostly in containers like
signboard.lzs and the fashion-design files, where the
pairing between tile sheet and palette isn't yet known.