Regional Differences

This is a sub-page of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time & Darkness.

Sub-Page#

European English Text Changes"We both have a thing for pincers!"

Title Screen#

Explorers of Time
Japan
Explorers of Darkness
Japan

• Curiously, all 4 regions use a unique Time Gear graphic for their game logos.
• Like Rescue Team, the European versions use an alternate font for the series' logo.

Animations#

In the Japanese versions, Entei mistakenly uses a placeholder sprite for its up-facing charge animation, despite including the correct sprite in the game. This was fixed in all international versions and the placeholder was removed. The placeholder reads "エンテー", a false spelling of Entei (エンテイ) in Japanese.

Japan	International

In the Japanese version, one of Suicune's side-facing walking sprites got cut off by 2 pixels on the rear side. This was fixed in all international versions.

Japan	International

The intended animations and sprites were previously present in Rescue Team and are used in those games without issues, suggesting mistakes were made while importing the sprites into Explorers.

Treasure Town#

In the European and Korean versions, the east side of Treasure Town was updated to fix a glaringly misplaced tile, containing half a jar, next to the upper middle tent. This change was applied to map T01P01A used during regular gameplay, as well as the visually identical (but animated faster) map T00P02 used in one of the debug rooms.

Curiously, the misplaced jar can still be seen in the map for Treasure Town within the European English manual, as well as all manuals for Explorers of Sky.

Gendered Hero Text#

In the Japanese, Korean, French, Italian and Spanish scripts of the games, the hero has two separate sets of dialogue, which is chosen based on their gender. In the English versions, these two sets are still present in the files, and the functionality that switches the dialogue still works; however, the two sets are almost always identical, meaning that the multiple sets are essentially unused.

That being said, there are a few cases where they are different, but they are incredibly minor and barely change the meaning of the dialogue at all. These examples may either be a simple oversight on the part of the translators, or they may be evidence that the two sets were intended to be more utilized in these versions, but were ultimately kept the same. There are also a few cases in the various debug rooms where the sets differ, but this is likely to be a holdover from the Japanese versions.

The following lines of dialogue are the only lines where the two sets differ:

• Text where the hero is being referred to in the third-person will switch between "he/him" and "she/her" as needed. In practice this only happens within the m12d1201 cutscene in D01P11A, which is the cutscene on the beach where the partner explains the hero's situation to Dusknoir. This dialogue was notably rewritten to be gender-neutral in Explorers of Sky.
• within the m01a0702 cutscene in D01P11B, which is the cutscene that plays after first completing Beach Cave:

• Within the m26a0401 cutscene in P13P01A, which is the ending cutscene:

• Within the s20p0305 cutscene in H02P99A, a Sharpedo Bluff scene in which one of the hero's lines is erroneously missing closing parentheses only in the male version:

• Within the ADEBUG debug room:

• Within the T00P01 debug room:

Shadow Ball's Secondary Effect#

The move Shadow Ball is intended to have a chance to lower the target's Special Defense. However, in the Japanese versions, the move erroneously lowers the target's regular Defense stat instead. It correctly lowers the Special Defense stat in the US releases, although it's worth noting that the official English Prima guide still mistakenly claims that the move affects the regular Defense stat.

Team Stats Screen#

The "Team stats" screen available as one of the top screen settings was reorganized, more than likely to accommodate the 10-character name limit in the western versions. Additionally, the Pokémon sprites were centered.

The Korean versions use the international layout, despite sharing a 5-character name limit with the Japanese versions.

Japan	US/Europe	South Korea

Friend Rescue Screen#

The Friend Rescue screen uses a string which tells the player which game the mail came from. In the Japanese versions, the names for each version are only two characters (とき for Time, やみ for Darkness), so they could fit this string on the top-right corner, on the "Title" line. The English names are quite a bit longer, so they were moved further down onto the "Client" line.

The Korean versions are once again based on the western versions, despite using two-character names (시간 for Time, 어둠 for Darkness).

Japan	US/Europe	South Korea

Icons#

The international versions polished up the glyphs for the L and R buttons. This change would be carried over to all regional versions of Explorers of Sky.

The European versions changed the icon of the touch screen button used for confirming menu selections from a maru (〇) to a checkmark. This change would similarly be carried over to both the US and European versions of Explorers of Sky.

E-Mail Functionality#

This needs some investigation. Discuss ideas and findings on the talk page. Specifically: Check the Korean version, which appears from a glance to have disabled the e-mail functionality as well.

The Japanese and US versions included the ability to send Friend Rescue requests and receive Friend Rescue notifications via e-mail, which has been disabled entirely in the European versions. Despite this, all of the related strings can still be found in the European ROMs and were additionally translated into French, German, Italian and Spanish.

While the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection servers have long since shut down, present-day players of the US versions of Time, Darkness as well as Sky can use custom servers to restore the e-mail functionality.