After 12 years, a seemingly abandoned fan translation for a lost Japanese action-RPG surfaced out of nowhere, but the original creators say it's "wildly obsolete"
Normally, the sudden release of a fan translation for a cult classic game would be a cause for celebration, but the launch of an English patch for Sega Saturn action-RPG Princess Crown has caused some ire in the community, as the original creators of the patch aren't pleased that somebody's taken up the torch in their apparent absence.
Princess Crown was originally released in 1997 by Atlus for Sega Saturn. It's a 2D, brawler-style action-RPG that stands out thanks to its gorgeous character sprites. Director George Kamitani would go on to found Vanillaware, which has carried the Princess Crown crown torch through the years in games like Odin Sphere and Dragon's Crown. Bits of its legacy even live on in the 2024 dark horse GOTY Unicorn Overlord.
Like many Saturn games, Princess Crown was never officially released in English. Two members of the romhacking community, CyberWarriorX and SamIAm, started work on a fan translation in 2012, posting an early build to a now-deleted GitHub page and providing sporadic updates to a Romhacking.net thread in the years that followed. Those updates eventually slowed to a trickle and while, as Time Extension notes, the creators insisted they were still working on the translation as recently as 2022, many assumed the project had either quietly been abandoned or would simply never see the light of day.
That's why it was such a surprise last week when another modder called eadmaster suddenly published a Princess Crown translation based on CyberWarrriorX and SamIAm's work to GitHub. It's a very early build and has quite a few flaws - it's got a fixed-width font that looks a bit awkward in places, it's missing many minor pieces of translation, and it hasn't been thoroughly bug tested. But it's the only English version of Princess Crown you're going to find out there.
The original creators aren't happy to see their work brought back in this way, and following eadmaster's release have posted a proper update video on their project while
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