Monster Hunter 2 English translation
モンスターハンター2 (ドス) · Monster Hunter 2 Dos
Break Arts' complete English translation of Monster Hunter 2 Dos, the only PS2 Monster Hunter that never left Japan, with every line of text and every UI texture redone.
What's translated
The team behind Break Arts set out to make a patch that reads like an official release. According to their project page, nothing is left in Japanese: NPC dialogue, quest descriptions, the tutorials, item and equipment text, menus and options, textures in the interface, and even the error messages of the old dial-up network code. The work took two people roughly six months, with the hacking and tools done by Kresna; a long write-up on the group's blog walks through the reverse engineering, the reworked text parser and the in-game keyboard.
The patch is a straight translation: controls, mechanics, weapons and quests are the same as in the Japanese game.
Playing it
The patch is applied to an image of your own unmodified copy of the game, following the instructions on the creators' page; every Japanese edition of the game carries the same data, so any of them works. It runs on real PS2 hardware and in emulators. Quick Chat phrases and the default equipment sets only appear in English when you start a new save on a memory card with no earlier Monster Hunter 2 data. Online play is possible again through the MHOldschool community servers.
Separately, GReinoso96's MH2Plus is an improvement patch that adds PSP-style controls and can be used together with this translation.