The story of the JUS Translation project

Introduction

In 2008, after learning Photoshop and getting into web design, I joined a fanmade translation project for The World Ends With You, a videogame I was obsessed about.

That project introduced me into reverse engineering and localization, and gave me my first real project in English.

The first JUS translation

After that, I collaborated in a couple of projects here and there, until one finally became my main focus: Jump Ultimate Stars! (JUS).

We spent two years translating, editing images, researching… Until the leader (romhacker and coder) of the project had to leave; so we deceided to stop. The game was 70% translated.

Tradusquare

In 2018 I joined Tradusquare, the main Spanish fan-translation community, where I helped doing graphic editing and coding. I developed multiple tools (see here) and made a post about a basic example of romhacking (read it).

I also started collaborating in SceneGate, a set of reverse engineering tools written in C#. Besides giving feedback of the tools, discussing new features and architecture, my main contributions were creating guides for the newcomers. Check my recent one in Texim, an image library.

That experience made me believe that we could finish and improve the JUS translation.

The new JUS translation

I created JUS-Toolkit to automate text and images exporting and importing.

What started as a continuation quickly became a full remake: new tools, new research, and a massive new scope that required way more work than we expected.

New blood

In 2019, one of our translators, Darkc0m, told me he wanted to learn about reverse engineering. At that time, I couldn’t dedicate much time to the project because of my job, so he ended up taking the lead.

He was a fast learner, a great coder, and managed to keep the project alive for two years while I supported him when possible.

Together with Pleonex, a well-known NDS reverse engineer, we managed to hack most of the formats and translate 90% of the texts of the game.

2024 personal year

In 2024, after being laid off from my position at Astara, I took a personal year, which allowed me to make significant progress on the project.

I completed the last major reverse-engineering challenges and assembled a new small team of English and Japanese translators.

My goal for 2026 is to finalize the toolset and focus entirely on translation and polishing.

You can check the current project progress here.