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 criticizing the derivative work. 

“Last week, Eadmaster took the assets from that now-ancient GitHub project, made a few minor adjustments, and used them to release his own Princess Crown translation,” CyberWarriorX writes in the description of the YouTube video above. “He did this without so much as giving us notice beforehand, much less asking permission. Strictly speaking, GitHub’s licensing terms do allow him to do so. However, in practice, this kind of thing is widely considered to be disrespectful and poor etiquette in the game translation scene. As we had always made clear, the translation as it existed then was not ready to be seen. Furthermore, it is now wildly obsolete.”

In an interview with Saturn fansite Sega Saturn, Shiro!, eadmaster confirms that he didn’t contact the original team behind the patch. “Since they looked overwhelmed with requests in the past I didn’t try to contact them directly, I thought I would be just bothering them. So I’ve just posted some messages on these two forums announcing I was working on this.”

A quick glance through the forum threads and social media chatter that have followed all this will tell you that the community’s pretty divided on who to support in all this, The original patch was posted as an open-source project that anybody’s free to continue the work on, but equally eadmaster’s version of the patch doesn’t exactly present the original work in the best light. It seems, more than anything, people are frustrated that it’s taken this kind of drama to get any kind of update on the patch’s progress.

“With this video, we aim to demonstrate our progress and show people that ours will be the translation worth playing,” CyberWarriorX concludes in that YouTube description. “No, we aren’t releasing a beta now, and no, we can’t make promises about when we’ll finish. What we can say is that Princess Crown deserves a high-quality translation, and that’s what we intend to deliver. Going forward, we’ll try to release more in the way of updates and previews. To fans of the game and everyone who has been waiting, we thank you for your patience. Believe us, we’d like us to get this thing finished, too.”

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