Progress ~ The State of SRW
Super Robot Wars EX | Super Robot Wars 4 | Super Robot Wars Alpha
# Posted on June 25, 2018, 5:59 a.m. by Gideon Zhi

With the recent release of The Elemental Lords, it's time to talk about AGTP's remaining SRW projects. First on the docket is Super Robot Wars EX, which thanks to some recent tooling I'm proud to announce has taken some massive strides forward in the last few weeks and is very close to being technically complete. The script is in reasonably good shape, though I'm in the process of passing it off for a second look-over by SSJCyberSonic who's fresh from his recent work on the A Portable project. I've added 22 new screenshots to the project's page and am attaching two to this post. I'm hopeful that the game will be ready before the end of the year, but as usual I can't promise anything. Additionally, EX's new toolchain acts as a functional proof-of-concept for work that will be going into Hero Chronicle.

The added benefit of having EX fully functional is that the work can be ported to the other SNES SRW games. SRW3, while impressive for its day, is not nearly up to standard and I'm intending to redo it with EX's new font code. And yes, the various incorrect character names will be fixed and the script itself will receive a fresh edit as well. The project's stuff, while usable, is all extremely old though and I'm basically going to have to redo the hacking from scratch. Shouldn't be too difficult, but no timelines or promises on availability.

So that's the good news. The bad news is that the translated lines for SRW4 and SRW Alpha probably fall about 50% into the "best guess" category; in addition to the poor writing quite a lot of the text was just flat-out translated incorrectly. Alpha has been undergoing a verification process with Jolly, the current editor, who's been steadily churning away on its gigantic script for the last several years; he's estimating that he's about 2/3s of the way through the script. What he's done does look really, really nice though, and I'm looking forward to seeing the final version of the text. For SRW4, we're probably just going to toss the script and retranslate it from scratch. Disappointing, but necessary. For the record, The Elemental Lords suffered a similar issue; this is one of the primary reasons the patch took so long in the first place. If anyone wants to have a whack at SRW4's text please reach out! There's an email button on the Contact page, and I can generally be reached on Twitter or on the Discord.

As a final closing note, I've made several minor fixes to The Elemental Lords. Typos, mispellings, that sort of thing. A few are still trickling in here and there so no new patch yet, but I'll push out a v1.05 or something in the next month or two once that trickle slows.