Supported engine · RPG Maker MV / MZ / XP / VX / Ace
RPG Maker MV and MZ are the most common engines for Japanese indie RPGs and eroge. RuneTranslate parses every translatable string out of data/*.json (MZ) or www/data/*.json (MV) — dialogue from event codes 401 / 405, choices from 102, scrolling-text blocks from 320 / 324 / 325, item names, skill names, terms, and plugin parameters — then writes them back exactly where the engine expects them. Dialogue lines are word-wrapped to 46 characters on export so they don't overflow the speech window in-game. Control codes like \C[1], \N[2], \V[3] are masked during translation so the LLM can't accidentally corrupt them. On Supporter and Pro tiers, the built-in Glossary feature force-substitutes character names, town names, and signature attacks so they render consistently across the whole game — no more the hero being called 'Hero', 'Warrior', and 'Brave one' in three different battles. Beyond translation, RuneTranslate's separate Cheats tab can inject a live in-game cheat menu into MV and MZ games — a hotkey-toggled overlay with add gold, godmode, full heal, no random encounters, and walk-through-walls, plus tabs that list and edit every game variable and switch. It's for offline single-player use and removes cleanly in one click. RuneTranslate also includes a save editor for RPG Maker .rpgsave / .rmmzsave files — edit gold, party levels and stats, variables, switches, and inventory, with the original backed up so you can revert. The older Ruby-based RPG Maker XP, VX, and VX Ace are supported too: RuneTranslate reads their Marshal-encoded Data files (and read directlys the RGSSAD archive when the game is encrypted), then translates dialogue, the database, and System terms the same way — VX Ace outputs full Unicode, while XP and VX render Shift-JIS, so they're best for English / romaji targets.
RPG Maker games are heavy on cast lists, skill names, and key items — exactly where machine translators drift over a long run. Add the hero's name, party members, town names, and signature attacks to the glossary once and they'll render the same in every battle screen and dialogue box. Especially valuable for long games (40+ hours) where the same skill name appears in 200+ different events. Glossary 101 →
Launch RuneTranslate, click New project, point it at the RPG Maker game directory (the folder containing Game.exe and www/ for MV or data/ for MZ). Engine detection is automatic — MV and MZ are recognised by their data layout.
Choose one of 30+ target languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Italian, Turkish, Vietnamese, and 20+ more). Pick a translation provider: DeepL for balanced quality, OpenAI GPT-4o or Anthropic Claude for context-aware LLM translation of long dialogue, or free Google Translate for menus and item names.
RuneTranslate batches strings to the provider and writes results into the project. You can monitor progress, retry failed batches, and manually edit any line in the built-in editor. Source language is Japanese by default, but you can set any supported source language (Chinese, Korean, English, and more) per project. Supporter and Pro tiers run more batches in parallel for faster throughput.
Click Export and RuneTranslate writes the translated JSON files back into the game folder (or a copy, if you prefer). Dialogue auto-wraps to 46 characters per line so it fits in the speech box. The exported build runs identically to the Japanese original.
