Roleplaying Dungeon 3: Translator’s Cut

Surely you knew it was coming — you just didn’t know quite when.

We at KAJITANI-EIZAN’s Patch Site: Reimagination hope you have had a safe holiday season and are settling into the hopeful relative normalcy of this new decade. We are also proud to announce Tales of the World: Roleplaying Dungeon 3: Translator’s Cut!

Similar to Roleplaying Dungeon 2: Translator’s Cut (ND2) and Tales of Hearts: Translator’s Cut, this version adds several new gameplay features in addition to the usual feats of programming required to deliver good English text presentation in an originally Japanese game. You may recall the subtitles for the voiced lines in battle as well as the proportional menu fonts that were added to ND2 — these were not present in the original Japanese game, but were needed for an optimal experience in English. These features have of course now made their way to ND3.

You may also recall that ND2 had a quality of life feature added, where targeting an enemy displays info about it. This was not present in the original Japanese game, and was not strictly necessary for an English translation patch, but reflected progress the Tales series had made in its battle system since the game originally came out in 2002. (For reference, Tales of Destiny 2 was the first game to include this popup info without the use of a Magic Lens/Inspect arte.) Continuing in this vein, further not-strictly-necessary features have been added to ND3, to improve the experience for those replaying it, or playing it for the first time, years after the original release.

One issue I always had with the original game has to do with characters’ High Ohgeez (or, as they are less popularly known, “Mystic Artes”). These are ultimate abilities that you can only use when you reach critically low HP, and as such, are not used often. In order to use them, you must either assign them to one of your four artes slots, or use them from the menu. The former limits your options in combat outside of desperate situations, while the latter is rather unexciting. Since this is a spinoff game based on the original Tales games, why not look to those for inspiration? In Phantasia, Eternia, and Symphonia, when playing as the main characters, you would press the trio of buttons, Guard + Attack + Artes, to activate such abilities. So naturally, it would make sense to port this feature here. Done and done! There is an additional “triple button” icon added to the menu to indicate artes with this capability:

Lloyd and Colette from Symphonia also have their Guardian/Damage Guard artes in this game, and they are similarly potentially awkward to use. Eternia introduced the capability to backstep using Guard + Down, while Destiny 2 and later games in the series used that input for magic guard or charge/flash. I have decided to make these artes, and other such defensive artes on other characters, activatable using that same Guard + Down input, and added an icon to their descriptions to indicate this as well.

You may also notice that you can’t change the battle mode (Manual/Semi-auto/Auto) during combat, and switching the controlled character requires an awkward trip to the party order menu. Further, if Julio or Caro are in the party, you are only allowed to control one of them, and not your other Tales hero party members. These issues have been worked around by implementing a battle mode switcher (press START at the battle menu) and the infamous “Moon Selector” feature (press L at the battle menu).

Finally, two words: Spell Cancel.

The patch download is below. Unfortunately, other than the subtitles, the translation portion of the project isn’t any further along — as always, please do let me know if you are capable and interested to translate the game. As with ND2, please note that should you wish to disable or enable Translator’s Cut features, press L (Lame) or R (Rad) at the title screen before starting a New Game, or L or R at the Config submenu once in-game. Your preference should be saved in your save data. See the Readme for more details.

[Narikiri Dungeon 3 English Patch v1.10][Readme]

That’s all for now. Hopefully things will look up, and you can expect another update sooner, rather than later! Take care and stay safe!