Breath of Fire 1 Unfinished Retranslation

I started this retranslation project in 2013 with Ryuusui, the English retranslator of Breath of Fire 2. We never finished it. You can see how things were going in this clip, though!

The whole game uses a proportional font. It pulls off elaborate tricks to keep performance up on the SNES hardware with the proportional font.

The in-game menu system for the original game was pretty bad, so I set out to redo it. I got pretty far with it, as you can see. Ryuusui did most of the edited graphics for this: the menu icon names, the "The Dragon Warrior" on the title screen...

I expanded the character names to 7 letters instead of 4 because of the characters whose default names needed it: Gilliam, Builder, Manillo (Woolsey's Bo, Ox, Gobi).

There are some visual design issues. The intro text is hard to read in places where the screen behind it is bright. The original game and the Woolsey translation got away with it by having a thicker font. Also, the menu screen's backdrop makes some of the text hard to read, even with the text shadow.

Holding down B to run is a debug feature in the game, one that I would've kept enabled for the final version. Breath of Fire 1 and 2 are notorious for their slow walking.

The hexadecimal numbers in the corner are a dialogue debugging feature in the original game's code. It tells me the string ID of the current dialogue window. I enabled it for my development because of how useful it is.