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Episode 697: Fan Translations, Revisited (Patreon)

Published:
2025-06-13 07:00:05
Imported:
2026-08
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By the end of the '00s, most of the white whales of untranslated games had been successfully localized by fans, but these triumphs didn't slow the scene down one bit. Now that the Mothers, Final Fantasies, and other popular series have all seen unofficial English adaptations, fan translators moved on lesser-known quantities that've proven to be just as worthwhile. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey and Wes Fenlon (of PC Gamer and Read Only Memo) as the two look back on where the fan translation scene has been in the past decade-plus.

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Comments

Craig

The FFV fan translation was my Beatles

K-S-O

Nintendo released official translations and a new game for Famicom Detective Club. They were not even desperate at the time. If that could happen then an official Mother 3 translation could still happen. It may still be a long shot but I do not believe that it is impossible anymore.

John Simon

Reading fan translator notes.txt can be fascinating stuff. “the item menu screen was created by one guy who had his own way of doing things, which is a completely different approach to the battle screen, and the characters walking around town screen and these teams clearly didn’t talk to each other” Or you can read notes on the efforts the translators went to get completed English scripts. Sometimes translating Japanese to French to English to glean insights on what the text was doing. --- One fun thing about Trials Of Mana's translation and how it wasn't exactly viable in 1996: Square was getting all they could out of the 32megabit (4 megabyte) rom the game originally shipped on. The english fan and modern translations have to expand the rom size to something like 48 / 64 megabit (4 / 6 megabyte) to fit the extra text. Only a few super-deluxe Japanese games like Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean ever shipped on cartridges over 32 megabit, and none in the US. This is likely because it's too expensive to manufacture these cartridges over a particular size, especially in the west where an RPG isn't a guaranteed hit. So it's a real testament to Ted Woolsey's translation skills that FF6 works as well as it did on the space he was given. Thing is, though, there are officially translated games that are -okay- but not stellar because of rom space, time, skill, etc. "Why bother re-translating Secret of Mana or Chrono trigger" ? it can't be solely for pedantic nerd reasons - nah, we got the clffs notes. (now, who under the age of thirty cares about Mana or Chrono Trigger? that's a different conversation) Anyway - Illusion of Gaia was retranslated, and it's sequel, Terranigma is in progress. Bleh sorry for the length, every rom hacking project is a small miracle and there's a reason why this kinda stuff takes years for bigass RPGs. It's summer breaks and more, autism-spectrum definitely plays a part into it. The fandom / emulaton scene also has some rough parts - the less adjusted super fans absolutely LOSE THEIR SHIT if you're a rom hacker working on an unreleased project and they think you're sitting on something they can't have.

Angel S.

A great episode, loved the romhack one from few months back, so that’s def another banger of an episode!

Grant Baxter

Fan translations (particularly the Mother 3 one, which was a game that really shaped me) had such an impact on me and I was so grateful for them that it was one of my inspirations for starting to learn Japanese in 2020. Getting older made me much more self aware of how much unpaid time and effort went into these translations that allowed me to experience some outstanding games I never would have been able to otherwise. I wanted to be able to play games without having to rely on the free goodwill of others, but I also sincerely hope one day to give back to the community and work on a translation of my own. でも、僕の日本語なんてまだまだですよ！

Glen Olivier

Tengai Makyō mentioned!! Also: missed opportunity to refer to Racing Lagoon as a CarPG 😏 Great episode!

Uhhh...Greg

Can we get an episode on the Wing Commander series?

Phos

So a little factoid that I always end up reminding myself of, I don't think Psychonaughts was ever released in Japan. There doesn't seem to be much of a scene around fan translating games in japan, ostensibly it's mostly fansubs of western cartoons and comic scanlations, so seems like there probably won't be a japanese version of Metal Warriors.

Daniel Worthintendo

I'm abit all over the place and playing catch up on episodes but absolutely loved this one and really wanted to leave my comment on this. I love the current state of translations but more so I love just how easy it is for us to be able to play them on original hardware now and even with the original titles. My first trip to Japan was in 2015 at the height of the 3DS, I was still in my naive I'll learn to read Japanese phase of life so I bought a Japanese 3DS and a bunch of games that never got localised that I wanted to play. Dragon Quest Monsters 1 & 2, EX Troopers and Beyond Labyrinth as well as some DS games like NiNo Kuni, 7th Dragon and a few others. Fast Forward 10 years later, I've still not learned the read Japanese, but what I have done is learned how to get custom firmware on my 3DS, upload the translation patches to it and be able to play these games and it's been a real joy. Sure some of the fan translations aren't at the quality of stuff like you'd see out of 8-4, but they are making games I'd always wanted to play and will most likely always be locked to these systems and unported playable. So thanks to everyone in the fan translation community, you guys do great work and help weebs with ADHD who struggle to learn new languages play stuff they always intended to but couldn't cause of the language barrier.