Tomato Adventure Japanese-to-English Translation (Live)

In 2016, I streamed a full live-translation of Tomato Adventure. You can follow along here if you’d like:

Game Overview

Tomato Adventure is a Game Boy Advance RPG from 2002 that was only released in Japan. It was developed by the same team that went on to develop the Mario & Luigi games, and the similarities really show. The best way to explain Tomato Adventure is: it’s a Mario & Luigi game without Mario and Luigi.

Here are a few places you visit during Tomato Adventure:

My Tomato Adventure History

After I finished working on the MOTHER 3 fan translation back in 2008, I still had the urge to reprogram and translate another GBA game. Since Tomato Adventure was another Nintendo-backed RPG that looked unique (and since my own online name is Tomato) I decided to look into it next. I spent a few weeks learning the game’s complicated text storage system, and then I wrote some tools to dump the text and reinsert translated text.

At this point, I realized that the game had way more text and was much more complicated than I expected. Doing a full Tomato Adventure translation would’ve taken me as much time as MOTHER 3 did, and I didn’t have the energy to dedicate another year or two of my life like that. So although my weeks of work had been fun, I quietly shelved the project.

In 2010, some fans were curious about the state of the project, even though I had publicly dropped it. Since I did have the tools and a proof of concept translation patch lying around, I posted them online for anyone to play around with. A few fans did try to tackle the enormous project, but sadly, nothing really came of these attempts.

In 2016, I decided to play through the entire game on Twitch, using the proof of concept patch to help people follow along. As I played through the game, Twitch chatters suggested new names for enemies, items, and the like.

Looking back now, the stream project turned out to be a surprisingly fun and interesting experiment in live, crowd-sourced localization. So whether you give the unofficial translation patch a play, watch the stream archives, or just read through these notes, I hope this work will bring you some inspiration of your own… or at least just some laughs!