Tottoko Hamutarou: Nazo Nazo Q

Tottoko Hamutarou: Nazo Nazo Q, similarly to previous games in the series, has a core gameplay gimmick about languages. This time, Hamtaro explores the world and tries to solve riddles using partially covered words as hints.

A localized version was seemingly in the works, which would have been titled "Hamtaro: Riddle Q" according to its registration in the U.S. Copyright Office.

Localization Leftovers#

The Japanese version has all required characters for an English localization, with proper kerning and everything. These characters are available in the naming screen.

On its own, this fact would already be slightly unusual, but the game has a partial font that only includes the Japanese characters it needs, and it goes as far as to prepare (unused) placeholder characters roughly matching where the European characters would go in Hamtaro: Rainbow Rescue, coded to use the apostrophe as a placeholder graphic (or the up arrow for the additional icons from the extended localization font). Trying to load character values from after the placeholder character values will show garbage graphics instead.

References#