A long time ago, I began work on fan translating parts of Densetsu no Starfy(伝説のスタフィー) for the Game Boy Advance. This was based on the preliminary work of a few ROM hackers such as Normmatt and Spikeman (and the project was inspired to revive after the curiosity of Blackmage907 https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=14082.0 ). I quit the project on and off, for two reasons; due to concerns (bluntly due to my 'paranoia') and because my Japanese is elementary level at best, but have settled on only playing ROMs of games I own an official physical cartridge of.
Thanks to pablitox who managed the project and the late, now main translator Higsby, the project is mainly complete. (At first it used a few translations from people like TheDWJProductions before being reworked entirely for accuracy) What remains to do on the project are translations of the graphics, and a few text layout fixes/bug/typo fixes. (A public beta)
Now you can use the 'Lunar IPS' tool to apply it to the official ROM. Enjoy :)
If you want to contribute further, here is a Discord invite link https://discord.gg/5KmWvZu
I created a copy of a different revision of the English script which can be found here, but has not yet been cleaned up:
Edit @April 7, 2020: Please use Starfy IPS.ips, not the zip. For an unknown reason an older inaccurate translation attempt got labelled under 2020 on the drive. Sorry about this.
What is Starfy?
The Legendary Starfy series is its own series of five games by TOSE, a well-known 'ghost-developer', which means they like to outsource their works to other companies. Starfy is an exception, which TOSE openly take credit for, and was a collaboration between Nintendo/TOSE (directed by Nintendo's Hitoshi Yamagami and TOSE's Yasuhiro Minamimoto). Of the five games in the series (the first three for GBA, the last two for Nintendo DS) only the last one was localised into English, in which it become simply known as 'The Legendary Starfy' (and was reworked to appeal to an even younger audience, unlike games like Starfy 2 and Starfy 3 that are still lighthearted but have more serious themes). The rest of the games were left in Japan, for apparently being seen as 'too Japanese in style'. Each of the five games are completely different, but share a genre officially known as 'Marine Action', which is a mix of platforming and floaty swimming mechanics.
This translation patch is for the first game (which may be called 'Starfy 1'), which was a lot simpler than the later successors. During the era of the official Japanese version's release, it made a cameo appearance on a movie theater in the game Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga.
For an unknown reason, not all computers allow for movement by holding left+up at the same time, b+right+a, etc. This can make the game very hard to play, however in other circumstances it will work, and will theoretically work on another platform that runs GBA ROMs.
