GuestLog in

Back in the day when i played SMRPG in a friend's house with my friend, the strange names did caught us off guard, and if this patch did exist in that same exact time, we would be blown away because it feels more natural and more at home within the funny wahhoo guy's universe.

Some names like "Yo'ster Isle" make the game's text look odd, specially if you are used to the modern names (Yoshi's Island), and this patch fixes that without altering the game's experience.

The "Magikoopa" to "Kamek" it's also a really nice change.

I definitely recommend it.

EDIT: Apparently, this hack has since been updated, offering several fixes previously missing. I highly recommend ignoring this review, on account of it being outdated.

This hack claims to revert names inconsistent with the rest of the series to their proper modern equivalents. For some, such as Toadstool, Goby and Yo'ster Isle, it does exactly that. For many others, however, the hack appears to completely ignore them. Take, for example, the Beezo enemy. The author claims that "Shy Away" is not a mistranslation, and better establishes this enemy as a Shy Guy subspecies. This is simply untrue. Shy Guy's Japanese name is Heiho, a pun on the Japanese term for "foot soldier." While Shy Guy subspecies throughout the series do indeed incorporate some form of "Heiho" pun in their Japanese names, Beezo does not. Instead, Beezo's Japanese name is Tondariya, a portmanteau of the words "tonda" and "yari." (past tense of "fly" and "spear," respectively) Ignoring all of that, there is still the fact that the character has been localized as "Beezo" in every game it has appeared in before or since the release of Super Mario RPG. Why be inconsistent with the rest of the series over a naming scheme that a quick Google search reveals was nonexistent in the Japanese script?

Furthermore, this hack also ignores several blatant mistranslations, a prime example being the Mushroom Kingdom area. Its Japanese name is rather explicit in calling the area "Mushroom Castle;" the kanji used is very clear in that regard. Woolsey has mentioned in interviews that he often needed to truncate his translations due to space limitations, so one has to wonder why he would name the area a "Kingdom," when "Castle" was not only shorter, but more accurate to the Japanese script. Another mistranslation, this one a little more understandable, is the Reacher enemy. Its Japanese name is "Gravey," a reference to the enemy's sprite featuring a gravestone, but the name is written in a way that one could easily misread it as "Grabby." Hence, Reacher. "Gravey" isn't a fanmade name or translation, mind you. It's a straightforward transliteration of the Japanese name, which was written in Katakana, a Japanese alphabet commonly used to transliterate foreign words.

Overall, what this hack does right, it does so magnificently. That being said, there is simply too many errors and inconsistencies with Nintendo's official localizations for me as a fan to ignore. I simply cannot give this hack my seal of approval, but I strongly wish the author success in future projects.

I'm really happy this exists. It's a nice balance between the vanilla experience and just touching up some name oddities. I dig all of the changes made here, especially renaming Toadstool to Peach, and Magikoopa to Kamek! It even fixes the weirdest name in the game, Neosquid! Great work, and thanks for doing this!

I never had any problems with Super Mario RPG's original localization. I am one of the people who DOESN'T CARE that Woolsey's translation wasn't 101% faithful to the Japanese original text/kanji, and never even thought about its accuracy before. That's why I like this hack. It changes ONLY what is needed; no more no less, and no extraneous meddling. The few naming oddities in the game are now fixed, and nothing else has been touched... as it should be. Toadstool is Peach, and everything is right in the world!

Does exactly what was promised, and is EXACTLY the kind of update this game needed - I couldn't agree more with the choices made!

That said, even *more* important to me (than the modernization aspects) was fixing some of the strange names that were always just... cringe, for lack of a better word. Even as a kid in the mid-90's I thought "Yo'ster Isle" was such a painfully corny name. Of course, this hack fixes that - finally no more awful early-90's Bart Simpson dude-isms.

And as others have correctly stated, this does nothing that oversteps into unneeded changes in any way - it's perfect!

This is a neat patch. What's more interesting is that the game it was made for released in 1996, the same year as Super Mario 64. Why did I bring that up? Because Super Mario 64 first made Peach's real name canonical in the west like Sonic Adventure made Dr. Eggman's real name canonical. But, I digress. Solid patch overall.