Control Codes, Glyphs & Ruby Text

Glyphs

In the 3DS Yo-kai Watch games, for any source of rendered text, a feature is supported whereby you can enclose the name of a resource from any currently loaded ANM in square brackets and it’ll be rendered, substituting the code. We call this code a glyph. Here are some examples:

• [g_coin] - Confirmed to work in Yo-kai Watch 2
  • Named after ゲームコイン (Gēmukoin) aka game coin - the Japanese term for Playcoins. Used for the Crank-a-kai.
• [key] - Confirmed to work in Yo-kai Watch 2
  • This key glyph is used to signify “Key Quests” in the game - and is used in nearly half the phase text cfg.bins!.
• [home] - Confirmed to work in Yo-kai Watch 2
  • This is only used in one text file in the game - the text that appears after you have successfully saved the game.
• [next_arrow] - Confirmed to work in Yo-kai Watch 2
• [misn_arrow] - Confirmed to work in Yo-kai Watch 2
• [misn_arrow2] - Confirmed to work in Yo-kai Watch 2
• [watch] - Confirmed to work in Yo-kai Watch 2
• [mission] - Confirmed to work in Yo-kai Watch 2
• [mission2] - Confirmed to work in Yo-kai Watch 2
• [btn_l_w] - Confirmed to work in Yo-kai Watch 2
• [btn_r_w] - Confirmed to work in Yo-kai Watch 2
• [btn_a_w] - Confirmed to work in Yo-kai Watch 2
• [btn_x] - Confirmed to work in Yo-kai Watch 2

Control Codes

In Yo-kai Watch, you may notice some strings include patterns such as <SOMETHING>TEXT</SOMETHING> and <SOMETHING>. These are control codes and can be categorised as such:

• Colour Tags. These affect the colour of the enclosed text.
• Keywords. These are used to substitute values e.g. <GENDER>.
• Actor control codes. These such as <V>, which plays audio, have an indirect function and are usually not rendered.

Colour Tags

[!WARNING] Color Tags are not self closing; they must be terminated via </C>, even if not nested, to avoid visual glitches. No other known control code type has this property.

There are 3 kinds of colour tags:

• Named Pallete. Specifically, this includes <CG>, <CR> and <CN>.
• Direct colour. One can use <C#XXXXXX> and <C"XXXXXX> to specify an RGB888 colour.
• Numerical Pallete. YW2 supports C0 through C20. YWB supports up to C30. Unrecognised colours default to #000000.

For example, <CR>Red</C>, <CG>Green</C>, and <CN>Blue</C> are cool. So is <C8>Orange</C>.

Ruby Text

In Japanese builds (this functionality is not present in many localised builds as they do not utilise it), Ruby Text can be included via the syntax [a/b]. For example, [父/とう].