WHAT'S FIGHT DA PON!?!

The project I'm currently working on is a translation of Zennihon Puroresu: Fight da Pon! (or "Bong's Fight!" as a certain auto-translated chat participant calls it), an odd Japanese SNES game featuring the wrestlers of All-Japan Pro Wrestling moving around a board-game map, facing off against each other and strange fictional characters from the Black Pro Wrestling group in card-battle wrestling matches and participating in wacky cutscenes complete with canned laughter. Yes, this game has a laugh track, and it is awesome.

Thus far, I have played through the game and transcribed the entire script (as far as I know), but only have a small portion of it translated. Though I can tell you, the game is funny enough without even being able to undertsand the dialogue, but the parts I've deciphered are as strange as you'd imagine.

Also found some oddities, as there are some control codes that can be utilized within the dialogue that aren't actually used in the game, which led me to wonder if the game was built on a preexisting engine. They might not be of much use in this translation, but I figured out something new so I have to talk about it here...

On to some bad news, it turns out a good deal of the graphics (including the technique cards) are compressed, meaning I'll have to crack the compression scheme and write decompression and compression programs before being able to fully translate the game. I've just started on the first step, so we'll see how long it takes to complete (if it ever gets done).

I've also encountered the first of what's sure to be many translation problems, where there's a pun in Japanese that doesn't make sense when translated to English. Still trying to figure out what to do with those two sentences, but I've got time since it'll take a while to translate everything else and put a new font into the game before I can start figuring out exactly how much space I'll even have for this dialogue.

All this for Fight da Pon!...