Development history

Translating New Love Plus+ has been attempted more than once. This project is a continuation of that work, not a fresh start and not a criticism of the teams who came before. Most of the tooling and roughly 169 early scripts still in the current build come straight from their effort. What follows is a short archival summary of how it got here.

Info

Dates and names below are pieced together from primary community sources: the LovePlus English Proboards (loveplusenglish.proboards.com), the old LovePlusProject community Discord (from the NLPPATCH era, not this project's current home), and the GBAtemp threads. Treat them as “per forum posts,” not exact records.

Individual dates or attributions in the timeline may be off. Overall, though, this is how everything has unfolded so far.

Timeline

Two communities ran in parallel: the LovePlus English Proboards was the organizational home (team, permissions, the guide project), and GBAtemp thread 395574 was where the technical work was hashed out. Both fed the same tool and script pool: NLPTextTool, the LovePlusProject repos, and the NLPPATCH release. The milestones below are the organizational view; a corrected technical timeline from the GBAtemp thread follows.

2014
An attempt to translate the official Complete Guide book. It was abandoned once patching the game itself started to look viable.
2015
makein opens a GBAtemp request thread asking for help translating the game. The day-one blocker: the scripts are packed and compressed, with no tool to read them.
Mar 2015
Region-free play through then-current homebrew (HANS) makes running a patched copy practical for testers.
Jan 2016
A formal NLP+ English project forms on the LovePlus English Proboards. It is run by the LovePlusProject group, later the GitHub org of the same name, and coordinated by Dgrin (contemporary Proboards posts use the handle .:[R]Plus:.). jjjewel grants permission to reuse her team's finished Love Plus (DS) scripts.
Feb–Mar 2016
Integrating the DS scripts into NLP+ reaches roughly pre-confession coverage, about 28% of NLP+'s dialogue scripts. See the GBAtemp timeline below for what that figure actually counts.
2016–2017
Betas circulate via NTR / HANS and custom Citra builds. TextResource strings are edited in Excel sheets. An img.bin graphics injector is started but never finished; ETC1 / ETC1A texture encoding is the sticking point.
15 Aug 2017
Public release of NLPPATCH, dated 2017.08.15: about 28% of scripts translated, no graphics. It is applied as a HANS redirect through a patched .code file.
2018–2019
Staff shortage and stalled tooling. The recurring note in the threads is “we need a coder.”
Apr–May 2020
The project is declared discontinued and a reboot is invited.
2025
Dgrin announces NLPPCTR under the LovePlusProject org (GBAtemp thread 412840): a sister effort providing Citra custom-texture MODs (eye colours, contact lenses, and similar visual work).
2026 to now
EngPatcher and this site. The Manaka route and the common scripts are finished; the main TextResource table has a ~98% machine-translation pass; the English menu UI is baked by splicing exact-size English packages into img.bin (ETC1A4 included); and the patcher outputs a one-click English CIA or a Luma / Azahar LayeredFS build. SMS / phone text is still 0%, and Rinko and Nene are still mostly the 2017 baseline.

GBAtemp technical thread (2015–2026)

Thread 395574 runs to 474 posts, 2015-08-22 to 2026-07-23. The dates below are “per those posts,” not exact records, and several early contributors were credited by Dgrin in threads whose original posts have since been deleted.

22 Aug 2015
makein opens the request thread. Day-one blocker: the scripts are packed and compressed with no tool to read them. The surviving first post was edited years later (it now shows a STATUS_28% line, Luma 8.0 steps, and download links), so August 2015 is not a “already 28% done” date.
Jan 2016
Script tooling breakthrough. An early parser from Nagato (credited by others in-thread) is followed by gdkchan's NLPTextTool (.dbin2↔ XML), around 27 Jan 2016.
28–29 Jan 2016
MGDanon demonstrates a HANS-based delivery method and the first in-game English proof of concept.
26 Feb 2016
internetakias suggests LayeredFS; later posts a title-screen music LayeredFS mod.
28 Feb 2016
Roughly 107 of ~161 corresponding Love Plus → NLP+ scripts integrated (of ~578 dialogue scripts total at the time). impeio92 and Keimeow credited for the bulk of that work (per Dgrin).
19 Mar 2016
The Love Plus → NLP+ port is called complete: 161 / 577 scripts. This is the origin of the lasting “~28%” figure. In-thread totals wobble between 577 and 578.
24 May 2016
The game runs in Citra through an unofficial build / fix (the thread links Citra PR #1641). Delivery paths are documented for HANS, NTR, CFW, flashcards, CIA, and Citra.
Jun 2016
froid_san (froid-chan) is credited by Dgrin for a manual way to inject edits into img.bin; deaknaew is credited for a .trb hidden-copy redirect done by editing code.bin. Dgrin calls the hacking issues “solved” via manual methods. Graphics stay blocked on a proper img.bin injector tool.
17 Jul 2016
deaknaew credited for an Excel-based extract / edit sheet for textresource_jpn.trb.
Sep 2016
Dgrin steps back “for a couple of months” (in practice, much longer gaps). Around the same time Romsstar posts one detailed breakdown of img.bin as nested PACK / PAK archives with a file table and compression: a single insight post, not an ongoing hacking role.
9 May 2017
NLPP TOOLS (kiwiz / Kai, with deaknaew, froid_san, Chulio) is published, still with missing functions. Not a finished public injector.
15 Aug 2017
First public partial patch announced by Dgrin (the ~28%-scripts era; NLPPATCH). The next day, notes on a .code plugin redirect so translated files take priority over the Japanese still packed inside img.bin.
3 Oct 2017
Drop-in patch instructions for Luma 8.0 documented.
2017–2019
Recurring ETC1 / ETC1A texture-compression trouble: edited textures can freeze the game, and a stable public img.bin replacement tool stays out of reach.
24 Sep 2019
Dgrin: progress paused over the texture / img.bin tooling.
18 Apr 2020
Dgrin: the team will not take donations (a condition set by the original DS-script contributor for lending that work); others are invited to reboot the effort using the existing tutorials and tools.
2020
rinkohot1337 posts an independent machine translation of about 401 scripts (player plus Rinko), NTR-oriented and self-described as poor quality. Separately, k7ra works on a Citra-only menu / image patch with Discord and Makein / NLPPGit activity; the scripts are described as translated, roughly half by machine.
14 Apr 2022
kiwiz's nlpp-fmt: worksheet export / repack with automatic ~30-character wrapping and tag rules.
23 Jul 2026
An EngPatcher update is posted to the thread. See the note below on how that announcement lines up with this site's current Progress numbers.

Warning

Announcements vs current metrics. The 23 July 2026 GBAtemp post announced EngPatcher with a headline 97%, partial menus, “SMS fully machine translated,” finished name tags, “no more blockers,” a planned V1, a roughly 24-hour patch build without a prebuilt release.7z, and a MediaFire link with a 14-day expiry.

That was one announcement on one day, not a status board. This site's Progress figures are counted from EngPatcher's own files: dialogue scripts 326 / 578, SMS 0 / 1822, system / menu TRB 24872 / 25346 as an unreviewed machine pass. Where the two disagree, the Progress page is what is current, and SMS is not machine-translated in the shipped build.

What “28%” actually meant

The 28% was the Love Plus (DS) English script ported into NLP+ (“LP → NLP+”), about 161 corresponding scripts. The other ~72% is script that is new to the 2014 game (called “NEW” in-thread by Dgrin) with no prior translation to draw on. Later thread notes add that many of the NEW files are shorter than the ported bulk, so the remaining line count is not simply 72% of the work.

Recurring blockers, then and now

The same short list of problems stalled every earlier attempt. Where each one stands today:

2015–2020 blocker	Status now
Packed / compressed scripts, unreadable	Solved: NLPTextTool and the `.dbin2` pipeline.
No permanent programmer on the team	Partly mitigated by the EngPatcher tooling, but still a one-maintainer project.
ETC1 / `img.bin` texture injector never finished	Solved for same-size UI chrome (splice only). Growing or reshaping textures still isn't possible.
Translating the “NEW” (non-DS) scripts	Still open: Rinko, Nene, and all SMS text.
Constantly-changing CFW / homebrew install steps	Mitigated by the one-click CIA and LayeredFS output.
Region / eShop revision testing pain; burnout	Historical context; the patcher now verifies known dump hashes up front.

People

Names that recur across the Proboards and GBAtemp era include na00, chrnos, makein, jjjewel, alphaultima, and Czero on the organizational side (the LovePlusProject group), and Dgrin, gdkchan, MGDanon, deaknaew, kiwiz, and k7ra on the technical side, among others. The full roster (earlier teams, NLPPATCH contributors by area, and the tooling authors) is on the Credits page.