-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
Home
Good news - I'm here to help. I'm the creator of the Consistent Localization series of mods for the Kingdom Hearts games, which were intended to iron out inconsistencies between naming conventions among the English localizations of the various games in the series (with a special emphasis on abilities and synthesis items). Note that my mods tended to focus on things that could be termed "system" text - things in menus and popups. Other text, such as subtitles in cutscenes, was not something I really dealt with and I'm not sure that this guide would be of much help beyond the basics.
First off, let's define some terms. There are four types of Kingdom Hearts game that we are concerned with: legacy, DS, Unreal, and Unity.
- Kingdom Hearts Final Mix
- Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories
- Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix
- Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep Final Mix
- Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance HD
These are the older games that run on a proprietary Square Enix-developed game engine. While none of them are identical to one another, and few if any tools can be used across multiple games, they are generally somewhat familiar to one another under the hood - you should see some similarities in file structure, organization, and file types across them. Due to the variability in how these games work and the availability of tools for them, the difficulty in modding the legacy games ranges from reasonably EASY to very DIFFICULT.
- Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days
- Kingdom Hearts Re:coded
These are the games that were exclusively released on the Nintendo DS and never got any kind of playable release on any other system and are only represented on PC officially through HD compilations of their cutscenes. Due to this lack of official playable support, the community has taken it upon themselves to essentially port these games to PC themselves, most notably through a project called Melon Mix.
Melon Mix is a fork of the MelonDS emulator designed to play these two specific games, enhancing them to the point where they are almost PC ports. Mixing elements of the top and bottom DS screens into a single PC-friendly view, adding control options not possible on the original DS, etc. Modding tools have also been made, but at the time of writing, they are still in fairly early development and there's much about the games we don't fully understand yet. Due to this, the DS games range from EASY to MEDIUM.
- Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage-
- Kingdom Hearts III + Re𝄌Mind
- Kingdom Hearts IV (anticipated)
These are the games that run on some version of the Unreal Engine, made by Epic Games. Due to this being an industry-standard engine that has who knows how many thousands of amateurs and professionals working in it every day, there is a treasure trove of information and tools made specifically for this engine that makes modding text in any of these games generally quite EASY (in addition to a standardized text localization system).
The version of Unreal that both 0.2 and KH3 used appears to have been forked from Unreal 4.17 (the original PS4 release of 0.2 used an older version, but seems to have been updated to match KH3 when it was ported to PC - this was not just an under-the-hood change, either, as a few game mechanics in the PS4 version were altered to be more similar to KH3 than the PS4 version was). Additionally, it's been officially stated that Kingdom Hearts IV (which has not released as of this writing) will utilize Unreal 5, which will likely have a similar if not identical text modding process.
- Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory
These are the games that run on some version of the Unity Engine. As of now, there is only one game in this category: the consistently forgotten Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory (release it on Steam already!). Due to the fact that I determined that there was no text in Melody of Memory that needed to be altered to promote consistency with the rest of the series, I never ended up making a Consistent Localization mod for the game. Therefore, I never delved into modding Melody of Memory or any Unity game at all, so I unfortunately can't give any guidance on how to mod the text for that game. However, due to Unity also being an industry-standard engine like Unreal, I would imagine that it is similarly EASY to make text mods for it - but I can't personally say that for sure.
Here is a more detailed breakdown of each game.
| Game | Type | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|
| Kingdom Hearts Final Mix | Legacy | MEDIUM to DIFFICULT |
| Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories | Legacy | DIFFICULT |
| Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix | Legacy | EASY |
| Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep Final Mix | Legacy | EASY |
| Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance HD | Legacy | DIFFICULT |
| Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days | DS | EASY |
| Kingdom Hearts Re:coded | DS | MEDIUM |
| Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage- | Unreal | EASY |
| Kingdom Hearts III + Re𝄌Mind | Unreal | EASY |
| Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory | Unity | EASY (I assume) |
The basic steps are the same regardless of which game you're tackling:
- Extract the game files.
- Find the file that contains the text you wish to change.
- Change the text within the file.
- Package the altered file(s) into a mod file.
- Install the mod.
Naturally, the "how" for each of these steps differs greatly between games. Go to the relevant page for details on how to perform each step:
- Getting Started (Legacy)
- Getting Started (DS) --UNDER CONSTRUCTION--
- Getting Started (Unreal) --UNDER CONSTRUCTION--