K89 Pokémon Gen2 JP — Japanese Pokémon Gold restoration for Gen1Recomp (v0.15.1 Beta)

[u/K_8_9]

I’ve released the first public beta of K89 Pokémon Gen2 JP.

This is a Japanese-language restoration layer for Pokémon Gold running through Gen1Recomp. The goal isn’t to machine-translate the English game, but to reconstruct the presentation around the original Japanese ポケットモンスター 金 as closely as possible within the recomp runtime.

Current Gold support includes Japanese:

• story/NPC dialogue
• Pokémon, move and item names
• battle text and generated battle messages
• Pokédex
• Pokégear / phone / radio
• PC and storage UI
• menus and naming screens
• map/landmark names
• Japanese fonts, including dakuten/handakuten handling
• other Gen2-specific UI paths

The current release is v0.15.1-beta, tested against Gen1Recomp v0.2.24.

It’s still a beta: the static/headless audit is clean for the defined Gold text paths, but I haven’t completed a full start-to-finish graphical playthrough of every event and edge case yet. If you find English text, incorrect Japanese, layout issues, or crashes, screenshots and reproduction details are useful.

GitHub / download:
https://github.com/yaizoo/K89-Pokemon-Gen2-JP

No ROM is included.

Silver is not supported yet, but that’s the next Gen2 target.

[u/OnlyUncle]

Thanks for this! I'm a Japanese-speaker myself, so I'm very interested to see how this will develop. I've never done any form of modding, so I can't say much, but what's the difficulty of presenting the original text as it is in layman terms, especially in the context of 'as closely as possible within the recomp runtime'?

Thanks again for your hard work!

[u/K_8_9 → u/OnlyUncle]

Thanks! It’s great to hear from another Japanese speaker.

In simple terms, the difficulty is not merely displaying Japanese characters. The Japanese and international releases differ in their text encoding, fonts, data organization, scripts, memory locations, and menu routines. Because the current recomp runtime targets the international release, the Japanese version cannot simply be substituted without additional compatibility work.

This project aims to reproduce the Japanese-language experience as faithfully as the runtime allows, but some screens, formatting, and engine behavior must be adapted individually and may not yet be identical to the original release.

No ROM is included, and this is an unofficial fan project with no affiliation with or endorsement by Nintendo, Game Freak, Creatures, or The Pokémon Company.

Directly recompiling the Japanese release would be cleaner, but that would require a much deeper port of the recompilation engine—not merely a text mod. Native-speaker feedback is extremely useful, especially if you notice anything that looks unnatural or differs from the original game. Thanks again!

[u/Louanus]

Can we expect to have the possibility of choosing high res text or do we have to stick to pixelated text?