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Princess Crown Translation Update: eadmaster Releases Version 0.8Back in October we played an in-progress translation build for the legendary Princess Crown on Sega Saturn. This version was still in its early stages, as version 0.3, but allowed players to experience Princess Crown in English for the first time. This version was mired in controversy , however, as its author, eadmaster, used a forked version of the code from the original translation work from Sam I Am and Cyber Warrior X, without permission, though still within the legal scope of GitHub. I’m not going to cover the situation any further than that, there are several articles on SHIRO! that cover it extensively for those who are curious. However, in the end we wound up with three separate translation projects: Sam I Am and Cyber Warrior X’s, eadmaster’s and a new translation by eadmaster’s short-lived translation partner, MiYakuGaming. To be honest, while Sam and Cyber Warrior’s project has been demonstrated as being in a highly polished near final state, I was dubious about the progress of the other two translations. So, I was pleasantly surprised when a commenter on our original Princess Crown video alerted us to a new version that eadmaster has shared. This version, dubbed 0.8 , looks, quite honestly, phenomenal. Gone are the letter spacing issues seen in October and the awful looking corruption that we would see when text overran the speech bubbles. Character names are coloured and the font is so much more visually pleasing! Everything is now much more readable and accessible, and it feels a lot more like a full release, rather than the obviously flawed hack we saw originally. Dialogue is not quite perfect, however, as the text length will require new speech bubbles often, and sometimes you’ll get a single word in those text boxes. That’s not a terrible thing, and easily ignored, but it just looks a little unpolished. To be honest, you’d expect these tiny niggles, as it’s not the final version, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen retail games guilty of the same thing. What was really amazing to see though is that all the menus have now been translated. This is the first time I’ve seen the item wheel in English and I had butterflies in my stomach using it. Seriously, as someone who has struggled through their retail Japanese copy of Princess crown over the years, seeing this detail was a god send. Items and their use are detailed correctly. Once again, it all looks professional and accurate and makes a significant difference in gameplay. The same is true when visiting the item shops and the inn. Combat, too, benefits from this translation update, where in the previous 0.3 release we would see corruption when battle messages would appear, now we see those text boxes clearly and in English. It really makes a significant difference, being able to battle enemies exactly as Atlus (or Vanillaware) intended. This release is only a few hours old at the time of writing, so I wasn’t able to progress all the way through the game — which had been an issue previously, as the prior version of this translation would lock at certain points, requiring players to load up the original Japanese release as a workaround. However, part of this huge update is addressing those soft-lock moments, meaning players should now be able to progress through this translation from beginning to end. This is fantastic news for anyone who has been keen to play this Atlus Sega Saturn classic in English. Full details of the patch are available on eadmaster’s GitHub . Per eadmaster’s last update notes, the current status is as follows:
I tested this patch on both Fenrir and SAROO and it worked seamlessly on both! SAROO was particularly impressive as the improved load times really helped the entire experience along. As such, I would fully expect it to work on all other ODEs, too. But that’s it for now. A very pleasant surprise to see this project get such a substantial update, and while last time the drama around this game left a sour taste in some of our mouths, at the end of the day, we love the Sega Saturn. We want to play its best games and share them with fellow Sega fans, because sharing the love for the greatest videogames company there ever was is being a SEGAGuy. If you want to see the translation in action, check out our video below, and we will see you on the Sega side.
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