I had some fun over the last week preparing a gender-swapped version of EarthBound for the SNES. I made use of the excellent tool CoilSnake, which can be used to patch and rebuild an EarthBound ROM with modified assets and scripts.

The full set of changes includes things like:

  • gender swapping all Ness sprites, replacing his baseball cap with a red bow. Includes changes to Ness robot sprites, cycling sprites, climbing sprites, etc. There were maybe a dozen or so sprites that needed adjustment.

  • replacing Ness’ “Don’t Care” names with our list of preferred baby girl names.

  • replacing “Don’t Care” list for “Favorite Thing” and “Favorite Food” with things that seem appropriate for my daughter.

  • replacing Ness’ pronouns, references to “brother”, “guy”, “sir”, “3 boys and 1 girl”, “red cap”, etc.

  • color swapping Ness’ dog King to match the color of our family dog. This required a bit more work than expected, since color palettes are somewhat restrictive for these kinds of sprites, and palettes are shared across multiple different sprites. Thankfully, one of the game’s palettes is basically unused or duplicated from another one, so it was possible to free up a palette and define my own colors.

  • modifications to the credits font to add accented characters so I could include a special message for my daughter in French.

A screenshot from my gender-swapped EarthBound

It was a fun exercise but really surprisingly easy considering how powerful the CoilSnake tool is. This would be insurmountable for me without the tool.

I originally considered just getting a ready-made gender swap ROMhack, maybe from https://www.romhacking.net/. There are actually a few different ones floating around, with some having a trans Ness. One of the gender swap hacks apparently injects a bunch of other “red pill” content into the game’s text, which I didn’t want to have to deal with myself. Ultimately I decided it would be best, easy, and safest, to write one myself.

Now I just need to get my daughter to play the game eventually 5 to 10 years from now!